Listings The Finnish database company MariaDB is listed on the New York Stock Exchange through a spac deal

American spac company Angel Pond Holdings acquires the Finnish open source database company MariaDB Corporation.

Angel Pond Holdings is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Through the merger, MariaDB will become the first Finnish technology company to be listed on the United States through a spac arrangement.

MariaDB is an open source database, meaning that its basic version is free to use and is developed by the developer community. MariaDB, on the other hand, develops commercial services for large corporate customers using the database.

At the same time, Angel Pond and its other owners will invest $ 104 million in the Finnish company, or about EUR 92 million in growth capital in the financing round.

MariaDB’s old investors, such as the Finnish private equity company Open Ocean Capital, will remain owners of the company even after the listing.

Angel Pond listed on the New York Stock Exchange last summer, raising about $ 250 million in its IPO. According to the release, if Angel Pond’s shareholders do not oppose the deal, the deal is expected to bring in a total cash pot of up to € 282 million. This includes the funds raised by Angel Pond in its listing and the funding round now underway.

Among other things, the company is backed by a senior member of the Chinese technology giant Alibaba Simon Xie. The other founder is a former shareholder in Goldman Sachs Theodore Wang.

With MariaDB Alibaba has already had strong ties to Alibaba and the Chinese market in the past, with Alibaba ‘s cloud services provider Alibaba Cloud investing in it in 2017.

“Of course, the Alibaba connection was important here, they have been a good investor in the company for many years. One of the founders of Angel Pond is familiar from there, so it brought them confidence as an actor, ”says MariaDB’s founding member. Patrik Backman, which is also a shareholder in the private equity firm Open Ocean.

He is also on the board of the new listed company.

“We had been thinking about listing or raising the next round of funding. In this option, these paths merged. However, when the listing was sometimes ahead, it speeded up and made it easier, ”says Backman.

Technically in order a multi-stage share exchange is made, as a result of which MariaDB will become an Irish company and merge with Angel Pond there.

“There were a lot of international players involved in the arrangement and it was the smoothest way for the listed company to operate from Ireland,” Backman explains.

The arrangement is expected to be completed in the second half of the year.

In the transaction, MariaDB has been valued at approximately $ 672 million, or € 598 million.

According to the company’s press release, it corresponds to 14.2 times the company’s forecasted turnover in 2022, which would be approximately EUR 42 million. The company’s financial year ends in September.

At Spac (Special Purpose Aquisition Company) means a listed company that does not have its own business and has raised funding from investors to make an acquisition. It is thus a listed “cash pool” that is looking for an item that it can merge with.

In the United States, spac companies were one of last year’s big investment trends. Spac companies already accounted for 59% of IPOs in the United States, told the technology exchange Nasdaq. So they have plenty of dry powder, i.e. investment-ready capital, and have been looking for places to buy from the best growth companies.

After the transaction, spac and the acquired company will merge, and the resulting entity will become a new listed company. Its shareholders will remain the old owners of the target company, the founders of spacn and the investors who invested in spac in its listing.

For a growth company, spac is a way to raise growth capital and be listed on the stock exchange quickly through an acquisition without the high workload associated with listing.

In Finland and other Nordic countries, the listing of spac companies became possible in March, when the Nasdaq, which manages the stock exchanges, changed its rules.

So far, there have been two spac companies listed on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. The first was the Virala Acquisition Company, or VAC which merged with the Purmo Group, which provides heating and cooling equipment. The other was Lifeline, a private equity firm listed in October, which is currently looking for a target company.

Read more: Lifeline’s listed spac company has already received exceptional support from anchor investors. “We want startups to become a mainstay of the Finnish economy.”

MariaDB: n The founders are Patrik Backman, Ralf Wahlsten and Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius. All three have backgrounds in the MySQL database company where Widenius was the founder and lead developer.

MySQL is the most common of the open source databases running on the Internet and its application. American Sun Microsystems bought MySQL in 2008 for $ 1 billion.

Oracle again acquired the entire Sun Microsystems in 2010. Widenius and the core of the old MySQL development team abandoned and began developing a new database called MariaDB.

The company now has about 300 employees. Its financial statements for the financial year ended September 2021 are not yet public.

“Last year was very successful and turnover grew well. In particular, the new cloud-based database service sold as a service has grown rapidly, ”says Backman.

However, much of the company’s revenue still comes from software it sells to corporate customers, which brings management tools and features beyond the free version to large users.

MariaDB: n its market share has been boosted by its position in leading Linux distribution channels. When companies upload Linux systems to their servers, MariaDB is often automatically included in the package.

The popularity of open source databases has grown steadily and is now almost on par with commercial products such as Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon Web Services. MariaDB’s competitors in open source databases include MongoDB, MySQL and SQLite.

During its history, the company has raised a total of approximately EUR 109 million in financing.

Its most recent round of financing was 2020, when the company raised EUR 23 million in funding and investors included SmartFin Capital and GP Bullhound.