K1 Investment Management has made an acquisition bid of about 34 million euros ($37 million) to MariaDB. The bid for the database specialist comes after major reorganizations and spin-offs in 2023.
K1 Investment Management is offering MariaDB a bid of 55 cents per share. This is 189 percent more than the last listed value of a MariaDB share. This brings the total value of the takeover offer to $37 million.
With that, this proposal mentions a slightly lower amount than was the case with an earlier offer from Runa Capital. This investor offered 56 cents per share, but this transaction fell through. K1 Investment Management has until March 29 to confirm or abandon the final acquisition.
Takeover proposal timely
The investment company’s bid comes at a good time for the publicly traded MariaDB. The database company went public in late 2022, but its market value quickly declined.
In response, MariaDB had to intervene during the past year. Two rounds of layoffs followed, parting with a third of the employees. In addition, the SkySQL managed database service was spun off at the end of last year.
Early this year, the geospatial component of MariaDB was also divested. This business component provided software for analyzing satellite imagery and equivalent files.
Paid MariaDB database and additional options
The basis of MariaDB is and will remain a paid version of an open-source paid relational database. This premium version offers a number of additional options, such as the MaxScale proxy. This proxy provides an automatic replay of requests when initially interrupted by an error. It also redirects users to a backup database when a company’s basic MariaDB environment unexpectedly goes offline.
MaxScale additionally acts as a performance optimization tool. For example, the feature keeps an application’s most requested files in a high-speed cache to reduce access time.
Furthermore, the paid MariaDB version also has other features, such as an audit tool that monitors business information usage.
More investment in database start-ups
MariaDB’s acquisition attempt is not an isolated one. A trend of more investment in database-focused start-ups has been apparent in the database field for some time. In the second half of last year, start-ups such as Rockset, TileDB, ScyllaDB and Qdrant received more investments.
Also read: Oracle Database@Azure may backfire financially; Oracle points to advantages
1 day ago
