Stack Overflow Sold to Tech Giant Prosus for $1.8 Billion
Prosus, the company which develops online programming education programmes, said that it has inked a deal to buy Stack Overflow, an online community for software professionals, in anticipation of increased demand for online programming instruction.
Stack Overflow is based in New York, though it is privately owned. The firm uses the software primarily for usage by programmers and other job roles that have seen increased need for coding abilities such as financial analysts and marketers. The firm claims that it gets more than a 100 million visits a month.
Prosus, one of Europe’s most valuable digital businesses, is most well-known as the biggest shareholder in China’s internet and videogaming company Tencent Holdings Ltd. One of the features that may help improve a deal’s value is being listed in Amsterdam. When Prosus sold a minor piece of its stock holding in Tencent for $14.6 billion in April, it exhibited this attribute. Among Prosus’ largest purchases, the Stack Overflow deal rates at #1.
Prosus invests internationally across a number of online platforms focusing on different industries, such as food delivery, classifieds, and finance. Additionally, it has holdings valued at more over $200 billion in Tencent. In 2001, the South African telecommunications giant Naspers Ltd. acquired the Tencent share for $34 million.
Prosus’s first purchase in the educational deal sector was a direct result of its purchase of Stack Overflow. Prosus has previously invested in two educational technology startups: Udemy and Codecademy, which service corporations. The firm has already signed an agreement to make an investment in Skillsoft, a publisher of training software, which will be utilised by businesses as part of their strategy to merge with special-purpose acquisition company Churchill Capital Corp II and list their company on the New York Stock Exchange.
Prosus believes that, despite the impending threat of the Covid-19 pandemic, businesses will focus on building up their technological capabilities for remote working and online training in the long term.
“A worldwide pandemic helped make this industry a focal point and in the months ahead, we will see a wave of consolidation,” which is likely to prompt companies to make acquisitions or jeopardise their prospects, Larry Illg, Prosus’s executive director of educational technology investments, predicted.
A new acquisition is in the works for Prosus: They are acquiring Stack Overflow from the company’s founding venture-capital investors, including Union Square Ventures; Index Ventures; Andreessen Horowitz; Bezos Expeditions, the investment vehicle of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos; Spark Capital; Silver Lake and GIC, the Singaporean sovereign-wealth fund.
Everything on Stack Overflow’s website is free to access. Advertising income is generated by firms that advertise technology goods and firms that try to recruit future workers.
This firm also provides a subscription software-as-a-service solution called Stack Overflow for Teams to organisations who want access to a private version of the public platform for their workers to interact. It has several capabilities, including the ability to connect with several other applications like as GitHub, a website used for coding collaboration that Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018.
The organisations listed above, along with Siemens AG, Chevron Corp., Microsoft, and Liberty Mutual Group, are among the firms that have turned to Stack Overflow for Teams, according to Prashanth Chandrasekar, the company’s CEO.
There are around 85% of the organisations that utilise Stack Overflow’s Teams product that are situated in the U.S. Prosus is interested in establishing new platforms, which would allow it to have an expanded customer base and service reach in areas like India, where it has had great success growing with platforms like its PayU payments firm.
The goal of replicating that performance across foreign markets is a major priority for the deal, Mr. Chandrasekar said.
Expanding on their previous statement, Prosus’ portfolio firms have revealed that Stack Overflow will also receive access to the commercial clients of their other educational IT sector portfolio firms.
