Thales has reached an agreement with software investment firm Thoma Bravo for the acquisition of 100% of United State-based Imperva for $3.6 billion.
With this acquisition, Thales is boosting its cybersecurity business as Imperva is expected to enable growth in data security and Thales’ entry into the attractive application security market.
Imperva’s integration into Thales will significantly expand Thales’ addressable market in an already fast-growing sector.
Closing of the transaction is expected by the beginning of 2024, upon completion of customary anti-trust and regulatory approvals.
“With this acquisition, we are seizing a unique opportunity to accelerate our cybersecurity capabilities and are taking an important step towards our ambition to build a world-class global cybersecurity integrated player, providing a comprehensive portfolio of products and services,” said Patrice Caine, chairman and CEO of Thales.
With headquarters in California, Imperva has a global footprint in the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe-Middle East and Africa, and monitors threats across 180 countries.
Imperva offers an industry-leading Web Application Firewall (WAF), which prevents attacks by analysing web traffic to applications. Imperva’s Application Security portfolio includes industry-leading API Security, Advanced Bot Protection and DDoS.
Imperva has a highly recurring revenue business model and a large and diversified customer base. It serves approximately 35% of Fortune 100 companies and some of the largest groups in financial services, telecommunications, energy, healthcare, retail and e-commerce.
With this acquisition, Thales will add about $500 million of revenue and significantly expand its data and application security offering.
The combination of Thales and Imperva’s operations is expected to create a global cybersecurity portfolio structured around three product areas — iIdentity (Thales), data security (Thales and Imperva), and application security (Imperva).
Thales and Imperva will combine their respective strengths. Increased capabilities are notably expected in the fields of protecting data at rest and data in use, complementing Thales’ know-how in data in motion.
Imperva and Thales will also benefit from their strong complementarity and cultural fit in terms of clients and addressable markets. The combination is expected to yield significant commercial opportunities within the existing client base as well as revenue synergies in the years ahead.
Thales estimates that the combination will generate about $110 million of pre-tax run-rate synergies, including $50 million of cost synergies and $60 million linked to revenue synergies.
