SolarWinds to Be Purchased By Turn/River Capital for $4.4B

SolarWinds has agreed to be purchased by Turn/River Capital for $4.4 billion just six years after the observability and IT management software firm went public.

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The Austin, Texas-based firm said the proposed acquisition will help SolarWinds expand its vision in operational resilience and ensure the company’s IT infrastructure remains robust and reliable in the face of increasing cloud and AI technology demands. The deal will help SolarWinds innovate faster, increase its customer success orientation, and create more impactful technology for customers and partners.

“We now look forward to partnering with Turn/River to deliver operational resilience solutions for our customers on our SolarWinds Platform, leveraging our premier observability, monitoring, and service desk solutions,” President and CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna said in a statement.

The $18.50-per-share deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2025, and represents a 35% premium over SolarWinds’ average closing price for the past 90 trading days. SolarWinds’ stock climbed $3.28, or 21.82%, to $18.31 per share in trading Friday, the highest the company’s stock has traded since October 2021. SolarWinds went public in October 2018, raising $375 million on a $4.6 billion valuation (see: SolarWinds CEO on How to Secure the Software Build Process).

Even though SolarWinds is publicly traded, 65% of the company’s outstanding stock is held by private equity firms Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake, which have approved of the transaction by delivering written consent. Thoma Bravo and Silver Lake spent $4.5 billion in February 2016 to take SolarWinds private for a first time after the company had been traded on the New York Stock Exchange for nearly seven years.

What Turn/River’s Footprint Looks Like in Cybersecurity

Although SolarWinds focuses largely on database observability, IT service management, and monitoring and observability, the company offers a handful of security products including an access rights manager, SIEM and self-hosted observability. The company features a vulnerability and risk dashboard, security summary dashboard and simplified access rights management across Active Directory and SharePoint.

Turn/River Capital has a limited presence in the cybersecurity market, investing in Austin, Texas-based application security testing vendor Invicti in 2017 and leading a $40 million Series A funding round for enterprise web application security vendor Netsparker in April 2018. Netsparker joined forces with SMB-focused Acunetix to form Invicti, which in October 2021 received $625 million from Summit Partners.

In February 2020, Turn/River Capital invested an undisclosed amount in Romanian-based data loss prevention vendor Endpoint Protection by CoSoSys, which was acquired by Netwrix in February 2024. The private equity firm made its biggest splash in August 2022 with the $570 million acquisition of Boston-based network security vendor Tufin.

During SolarWinds’ most recent stint as a public company, Russian hackers bundled malware into an update of the company’s network monitoring software. Hackers from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service injected the software updater for the company’s flagship Orion application with a Trojan. The company said the infection reached fewer than 100 clients – but among them at least nine federal agencies.