MariaDB: Takeover and departure from the stock exchange

The ailing database company MariaDB Corporation Ab is being taken over by financial investor K1 and will therefore disappear from the stock exchange. The company is the central developer and provider of the open-source database management system of the same name, but also offers commercial cloud packages. The IPO also brings with it a new CEO: Rohit de Souza, who already has management experience from database specialist Actian and software company Micro Focus, will replace Paul O'Brien. O'Brien, who was only appointed CEO in May 2023, will remain with the company as a consultant. As an investor, K1 specializes in smaller software companies.

"This partnership will enable us to drive product innovation and enhance our ability to support new workloads driven by AI and the cloud," commented new MariaDB CEO Souza on the acquisition. Among the innovations announced is a vector search for MariaDB Server. According to the announcement, MariaDB Corporation has 700 major customers such as Deutsche Bank, Nokia, Red Hat and Samsung. The aforementioned ServiceNow will probably not be among its customers for much longer – as The Register reports, the company is switching to a self-developed database called RaptorDB, which is based on PostgresSQL, with the release of its platform called Xanadu.

IPO was a flop

The press release does not state a takeover sum, but the preliminary takeover bid submitted by K1 in February was estimated at 37 million US dollars. MariaDB has only been listed on the New York Stock Exchange as MRDB since the end of 2022. In the course of its stock market debut, MariaDB still assumed an enterprise value of 672 million US dollars. However, the share price plummeted rapidly. Most recently, the company was also in ever deeper financial difficulties and cut jobs. At the beginning of February this year, MariaDB announced that it had been able to agree a temporary payment deferral with its creditors.

MariaDB was created 15 years ago as a spin-off from MySQL. At the time, the creators of MySQL feared for the independence of the project after Oracle practically became the owner of MySQL in 2009 through a series of multi-billion dollar takeovers. To this day, MariaDB is considered a drop-in replacement for anyone looking for a completely open-source MySQL alternative. Well-known companies use the database to store and process data in their applications.

(axk)