Private equity firm Insight Partners to acquire Veeam for $5 billion

Veeam deal is expected to be closed in March 2020 and will take the company's HQ from Switzerland to the US

Private equity firm Insight Partners is to acquire Swiss start-up Veeam Software in an all-cash deal valued at around $5 billion.

The deal, which is expected to close by March 2020, will come with some major changes. The company's head office will be shifted to the US, and it will also have a new US-based leadership team. Co-founders Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev will step down from the company's board.

William Largent, Veeam's executive vice president of Operations, will become the CEO of the company, taking over from Baronov. Danny Allan, vice president of product strategy, will also be promoted to chief technology officer.

Veeam hopes the new deal will help it speed up its evolution into Hybrid Cloud, while continuing the growth trajectory.

Talking about Insight Partners, it is apparently having a liking for Veeam, in which it invested $500 million last year.

"Veeam's strong growth, coupled with high customer retention, unparalleled data management solutions, and the opportunities to expand services into new markets, make Veeam one of the most exciting software companies in the world today," said Insight Partners MD and Veeam board member Mike Triplett.

Veeam is a cloud data management company based in Barr, Switzerland. It was founded by Russian techies Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov in 2006.

The company specialises in backup and disaster recovery tools, which run across multiple clouds as well as in on-premises data centres.

Some big names using Veeam's software include Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, IBM, HPE, Cisco, and Dell EMC.

The company has more than 365,000 customers in over 160 countries, while having around 1,200 employees working for it in the US alone.

Veeam had a market value of over $1 billion prior to announcement of the new deal, according to Crunchbase data.

In 2017, HPE was rumoured to be looking at Veeam as an acquisition target.

Last year, Veeam purchased US firm N2SW to support cloud-native enterprise backup and disaster recovery for AWS, but later sold it in October 2019 after finding that it was unable to bid for US federal contracts due to its Russian links.

Veeam is the latest software company to be scooped up by private equity. BMC Software, Compuware, Tibco and Sophos have all been acquired by private equity firms in recent years.