A company that began life in a converted cowshed near York has just been sold for $10.7 billion.
In one of the biggest deals ever involving a York company, software giant Anaplan is being bought by private equity firm Thoma Bravo.
The deal prices Anaplan at $66 per share, 30 per cent more than the firm’s closing price last Friday.
The deal, worth £8 billion in our money, is the latest chapter in one of the most remarkable business stories to come out of York.
It was founded by Michael Gould in 2006 in his converted barn near the city. Frustrated by the limitations of spreadsheets and the like, he came up with Anaplan – cloud-based software that allows business planning to be carried out on a single system.
When his relatively small company signed up global tech giant HP as a client in 2013, it proved a turning point.
Today Anaplan systems are used by some of the world’s biggest companies, including Vodafone and Adobe.
Although the company’s HQ is now in San Francisco, its research and development arm moved into offices in the Bonding Warehouse in central York in 2014.
That’s where Michael and Anaplan senior vice president Jack Whyte are based.
In an interview with the Financial Times in 2015 Mr Gould said there were 90 staff at the York office. “Here, it’s a bit harder to find people,” he said, “but we get a very high rate of people accepting job offers.
“It’s very rare that we actually lose anyone too. And it’s a lovely place to live.”
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Anaplan now has 1,750 customers in 57 countries, 1,900 employees worldwide, and made $512m in the last quarter.
Of the sale to Thoma Bravo, CEO Frank Calderoni said:.“We are thrilled to partner with Thoma Bravo to build on the strength of our innovative platform and capitalise on the massive opportunity and incredible demand we are seeing,
“This is a clear validation of our team’s outstanding work and the start of an exciting new chapter for Anaplan, our customers, and our partner ecosystem. We are confident that Thoma Bravo’s resources and insights will help us accelerate and scale our growth strategy.”