Luke Bidco Ltd., formed by U.S. private equity giant Thoma Bravo, announced its plans to acquire British cybersecurity company Darktrace for $7.75 per share in cash, about $5.3 billion in total. The deal, expected to close by the end of 2024, will take Darktrace private, pending shareholder and regulatory approvals.

Founded in Cambridge, UK in 2013, Darktrace was publicly listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2021 at an opening valuation of about $2.4 billion. The company currently has more than 2,300 employees globally and over 9,400 customers including KPMG, City of Las Vegas, Aston Martin and McLaren Group.

Darktrace has been actively deploying artificial intelligence (AI) in cybersecurity. It introduced the Darktrace ActiveAI Security Platform earlier this month, designed to offer a full lifecycle approach to autonomously spot and respond to known and unknown but in-progress threats across cloud, apps, email, endpoint, network and operational technology.

Self-learning AI meets private equity

“Thoma Bravo recognizes that Darktrace is a pioneer in using self-learning artificial intelligence to neutralize cyber threats and automate responses to cyber incidents, leveraging its long-standing research and development expertise,” Darktrace wrote in the acquisition announcement.

The private equity firm claims the private ownership would help accelerate Darktrace's growth and the development of AI-augmented cyber solutions for its customers through Thoma Bravo's deep experience of growing enterprise software businesses, mergers and acquisitions (M&A) expertise and proprietary operational best practices.

“Thoma Bravo believes that the acquisition of Darktrace represents an attractive opportunity to increase its exposure to the large and growing cybersecurity market, and to invest to accelerate Darktrace's continued development and further scale the business globally,” according to the announcement.

Thoma Bravo grows its cybersecurity portfolio

Thoma Bravo's private equity software portfolio includes about 75 companies that generate more than $27 billion of annual revenue and employ more than 91,000 people worldwide.

The firm claims it has one of the largest cybersecurity portfolios in private equity, valued at $45 billion in total. Its cybersecurity portfolio includes Illumio, Intel471, LogRhythm, Sailpoint and Sophos.

Thomas Bravo last December announced the completion of its sale of Imperva, an application and data security provider, to French tech company Thales, in an all-cash transaction that values Imperva at about $3.6 billion.

In addition, the firm announced the completion of its approximately $2.3 billion ForgeRock deal in 2022. Thomas Bravo took the security vendor private and combined it into its portfolio company Ping Identity.