How founder and CTO Dries Buytaert sold Acquia for $1B

Acquia announced yesterday that Vista Equity Partners was going to buy a majority stake in the company worth a $1 billion. That would seem to be reason enough to sell the company. That’s a good amount a dough, but as co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert told Extra Crunch, he’s also happy to be taking care of his early investors and his long-time, loyal employees who stuck by him all these years.

Vista is actually buying out early investors as part of the deal, while providing some liquidity for employee equity holders. “I feel proud that we are able to reward our employees, especially those that have been so loyal to the company and worked so hard for so many years. It makes me feel good that we can do that for our employees,” he said.

Image via TechCrunch

He said yesterday’s announcement was the culmination of a dozen years of hard work by many people. It’s actually a story that goes back almost two decades and began in a dorm room at the University of Antwerp, where a young Buytaert developed the early versions of the open source content management system, Drupal.

Seven years later Acquia was born, and Buytaert says while he wasn’t looking for a buyer, recently several came a-courting. “Yeah, we were actually approached by a few firms, and so we decided to look at this opportunity, and decided we should do it,” he said.

He says that he and the executive team liked what they heard from Vista for several reasons beyond the dollar amount. For starters, the company was all in on supporting the open source side of the business. When asked how important it was to have a partner who respected the open source components, he didn’t pull any punches, saying it was critical, and they made sure Vista was serious. “As much as they did due diligence on us, we did due diligence on them too,” he said.

“We were born out of open source. All of our customers use open source. We give back to open source. It’s part of our DNA. It’s what we do. And so making sure that any new investor understood that and was aligned with was critically important, and Vista is very excited about the open source community around Drupal and Mautic (two open source projects Acquia is the steward of), and has even agreed to invest more in them,” he said.

It was more than aligned values around open source though. He says that Acquia is competing with some big companies like Adobe and it needs more capital, especially for larger M&A projects, and Vista provides that financial backbone that they have been lacking. While they have been able to make a couple of smaller acquisitions, being part of Vista should open the door for far more substantial ones.

“We did a number of acquisitions with our own funding, but if we wanted to do larger ones, and do more of them, we needed to have access to capital. And this was a great way to get access to capital and smart capital that specializes in these things,” he said.

He said, this doesn’t mean it’s the end of the line for the idea of going public. In fact, Ping Identity, a company that Vista bought in 2016, went public this week, so it’s not out of the realm of possibility. “I think going public is still an option for us, and as you mentioned, Ping Identity is a Vista company that went public. So that’s still in the cards for us. We don’t know what the future will bring, of course, but we could be a public company one day,” Buytaert said.