Highlights:

  • The investment company wants to buy MariaDB private for 55 cents per share, which is 189% more than the company’s most recent unaffected stock price.
  • Following its 2009 introduction, MariaDB raised over USD 200 million from investors.

K1 Investment Management is interested in purchasing MariaDB plc, the firm that sells the open-source relational database of the same name.

The software developer recently revealed the news. MariaDB reports that K1 has sent it an “unsolicited nonbinding indicative proposal,” which it states may not result in an acquisition bid. The company states that K1 must make an offer by March 29 or withdraw the proposal.

The investment company wants to buy MariaDB private for 55 cents per share, which is 189% more than the company’s most recent unaffected stock price. The software developer would reportedly be worth roughly USD 37 million in response to such an offer. Runa Capital had previously made MariaDB a somewhat larger preliminary offer of 56 cents per share, but the purchase negotiations ended without a deal.

Based in Redwood City, California A paid edition of the eponymous open-source relational database is offered for sale by MariaDB. Its database distribution includes a number of features absent from the original, including a proxy known as MaxScale. In the event that a company’s primary MariaDB environment becomes inactive, the proxy can redirect user requests to a backup database and retry queries that are interrupted by an error.

MaxScale functions as a tool for performance optimization. MariaDB claims that it can shorten access times by storing the records that are most frequently accessed by an application in a high-speed cache. In addition to MaxScale, the database distribution from the software company has several other capabilities, most notably an audit tool for monitoring the usage of business information.

Following its 2009 introduction, MariaDB raised over USD 200 million from investors. It went public at a USD 672 million valuation in late 2022 through a merger with a special purpose acquisition firm. In the months that followed the offering, MariaDB’s valuation drastically dropped, forcing it to make several substantial business changes.

In two rounds of reductions last year, the software developer reduced its workforce by more than one-third. In addition, MariaDB separated off its managed database service provider subsidiary SkySQL. Subsequently, the organization divested its geospatial division, which offered software applications designed to analyze satellite imagery and associated file formats.

In the recent quarters, there has been a substantial amount of investment activity in the database sector. Eight-figure fundraising rounds were closed by many database firms, including Rockset Inc., TileDB Inc., ScyllaDB Inc., and others in the second half of 2023. More recently, Qdrant, a different participant in the sector, raised USD 28 million in January of this year to assist businesses in storing the data that their AI models process.