Applications networking company F5 announced that it is acquiring Volterra, a multi-cloud management start-up, for USD 500 million. The details of the acquisition were aired on January 8, 2021. Regarding the financial details, USD 440 million was given in cash and USD 60 million in deferred and unvested incentive compensation.
Volterra was founded in 2019 with a sum of USD 50 million investment from various sources, including Khosla Ventures and Mayfield, plus strategic investors such as M12 (Microsoft’s venture arm) and Samsung Ventures. Here is a short description of the company by the company itself:
“Volterra has innovated a consistent, cloud-native environment that can be deployed across multiple public clouds and edge sites — a distributed cloud platform. Within this SaaS-based offering, Volterra integrates a broad range of services that have normally been siloed across many point products and network or cloud providers.”
F5 President and CEO François Locoh-Donou, while talking about the product line, said, “With Volterra, we advance our Adaptive Applications vision with an Edge 2.0 platform that solves the complex multi-cloud enterprise customers confront. Our platform will create a SaaS solution that solves our customers’ biggest pain points.”
The Volterra Founder and CEO Ankur Singla said in a company’s blog post, “When we started Volterra, multi-cloud and edge were still buzzwords and venture funding was still searching for tangible use cases. Fast forward three years, and COVID-19 has dramatically changed the landscape — it has accelerated the digitization of physical experiences and moved more of our day-to-day activities online. This is causing massive spikes in global Internet traffic while creating new attack vectors that impact the security and availability of our increasing set of daily apps.”
Surely, Volterra’s capabilities will enhance the working of the F5 family of products for solving the issues.
The regulatory approvals of the deal are expected to get completed before the end of March 2021.
