A private equity biz has succeeded in its takeover of MariaDB 18 months after its disastrous IPO.

The database company built on a fork of MySQL has been struggling for the last year with a string of alternative takeover proposals as its share-price performance failed to impress.

Today, K1 Investment Management, a private equity investment firm based in Manhattan Beach, California, announced it had completed its tender offer to acquire 100 percent of the issued ordinary shares of MariaDB.

In a statement, Sujit Banerjee, managing director of K1 Operations, said: "We are thrilled to welcome MariaDB to the K1 portfolio. Together, we aim to accelerate product innovation and continue MariaDB's mission of delivering high-quality, enterprise-grade solutions to meet the growing demands of the market."

As the acquisition - which began in February - was completed, MariaDB appointed a new CEO, Rohit de Souza, a veteran of MicroFocus, HP, and Oracle.

He replaces Paul O'Brien, who was appointed in January 2023 to replace former CEO Michael Howard. O'Brien will remain an advisor. MariaDB said it would continue with product releases, including the launch of vector search in MariaDB Server, and a Kubernetes Operator, catering to AI and cloud-native trends.

"With K1's support, we are poised to expand our capabilities and continue delivering the innovative database solutions our customers rely on," De Souza said in a statement.

Open source MariaDB was sharded out of MySQL, the open source relational database. MySQL had been part of Sun Microsystems since 2008, but when Oracle bought Sun in 2010, MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius forked the code to a new open source database, MariaDB.

The MariaDB company, which K1 has bought, uses the Business Source License and proprietary model to build products around the core database.

The company floated on the New York Stock Exchange in late 2022, having announced a plan to go public via special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Angel Pond, which initially valued the company at $672 million.

In April 2023, it cut a number of jobs and reiterated a "going concern" warning over its medium-term financial viability. In May, the company was in "advanced discussions with a large commercial bank about a loan facility." In August, it said discussions for additional capital continued as it neared maturity on an existing loan plan.

In October, MariaDB plc announced access to a new $26.5 million loan facility but said it was ditching strategic products and cutting 28 percent of the workforce. The move to end product lines, which included its DBaaS service, baffled analysts.

In December, it spun out the SkySQL DBaaS to be owned by a newly established cloud database company of the same name.

In February 2024, a fund controlled by K1 offered $0.55 per share, equivalent to $37.3 million. To put that in perspective, in the run-up to its December 2022 IPO, the company's value was estimated at $672 million. In March, development and infrastructure software company Progress considered a possible offer for MariaDB plc at $0.60 per share, valuing the firm at around $40.6 million.

The core MariaDB Server - the free and open source software licensed under GPL v2 - is managed by the MariaDB Foundation. Last fall, foundation CEO Kaj Arnö told The Register "sanity" had returned to MariaDB plc in terms of its cooperation with the open source community.

Developers and users will be waiting and watching to see if that continues under the company's new private equity owners. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/09/10/maria_db_buyout/