NetApp sells Spot to Flexera for $100 million, four years after $450 million acquisition
NetApp sells Spot to Flexera for $100 million, four years after $450 million acquisition
The move marks a significant shift as NetApp refocuses on its core data infrastructure business.
The storage giant NetApp is selling the operations of Spot, the Israeli startup it acquired in 2020, for approximately $450 million. The buyer is Flexera, which, according to reports, purchased Spot, as well as the activity of CloudCheckr, for about $100 million. The reason for the sale is NetApp's desire to focus on the data infrastructure sector, which does not include Spot's operations.
Following its acquisition of Spot, NetApp also purchased another company in the cloud management space, CloudCheckr, for a combined total of over $650 million. Therefore, the sale of both companies for $100 million reflects a recognition of the loss in value of this business.
Spot and CloudCheckr's operations were part of NetApp's cloud business, which accounts for 10% of its revenue. This revenue is expected to be affected by the sale.
“A tsunami of artificial intelligence applications is exponentially increasing organizations’ consumption of cloud resources,” said Jim Ryan, President and CEO of Flexera. “Yet, we hear from many organizations about the difficulty in answering basic questions like ‘what technology services do we use?’ and ‘why are our cloud bills so high?’. Our acquisition of Spot is the next step in Flexera’s strategic plan to provide organizations with a full panorama of their technology spend and risk across the entire IT ecosystem. We want to make it easy for anyone to find and analyze any data related to spend and risk for any kind of technology, anywhere it lives.”
Spot, formerly known as Spotinst, was founded in 2015 by Amiram Shachar, Liran Polak, and Aharon Twizer. Shachar and Polak went on to found Upwind, a company specializing in cloud security solutions. Upwind raised $100 million in Series A funding last month at a company valuation of around $900 million. Twizer has also since founded another startup, named ControlMonkey, which has developed an end-to-end cloud automation platform. The company raised a $7 million Seed round earlier this week.
