While wider tech industry is hurting, analytics companies fatten up

Log management and analytics biz Sumo Logic has agreed to a private equity buyout valuing the firm at around $1.7 billion.

Francisco Partners, a global investment business specializing in the tech sector, has shelled out $12.05 per share in cash to take control of the company, which helps manage and analyze telemetry data from physical machines and has expanded to event logs in computing environments.

Sumo Logic counts Airbnb, Sega and Toyota among its customers. The deal is designed to enhance its "ability to expand its market opportunity, innovate on its critical solutions, accelerate growth, and further its vision," according to a statement.

Chuck Robel, lead independent director on the Sumo Logic board, said the sale would offer a "substantial premium and a compelling cash value to our stockholders."

In a prepared statement, Brian Decker and Evan Daar of Francisco Partners said Sumo Logic was "ideally positioned" to capitalize on the large and growing demand from enterprises for observability and security solutions. "Its leading, cloud-native analytics platform provides the scalability and insights required as applications and data proliferate in today's digital world."

• Redis swallows RESP.app biz that made its database easier on developers
• AWS and Splunk partner for faster cyberattack response
• It's IPO week and one of Wall Street's own is raising the spectre of a stock market crash
• Machine log roller Sumo Logic expands to swallow AWS data-watching, DevOps performance

In 2020, Sumo Logic tweaked its technology platform to help sift through applications and infrastructure that run on AWS as well as keep an eye on software development cycles. The company's tech is based on Apache Lucene, the open source search engine software library, which is also the basis for Elastic Search, and includes other proprietary and open source technologies.

Later that year, Sumo logic raised $326 million, pricing 14.8 million shares at $22, above the estimated range of $17 to $21.

Despite the current tech slump, it has been a busy week for investors in smaller firms specializing in data technologies.

InfluxData, which built the time-series database InfluxDB, said it had raised $81 million in capital funding in a Series E round, bringing its total equity funding to $171 million.

Meanwhile, Onehouse, which offers a datalake-as-a-service, raised $25 million in Series A funding following last year's $8 million seed funding. The company bases its technology around Apache Hudi, which is designed to replicate large amounts of transactional or event stream data into a data lake. ®