British AI cybersecurity vendor Darktrace won’t be acquired by US personal fairness agency Thoma Bravo.
In an announcement to the London Inventory Alternate (LSE) on Thursday 8, 2022, Darktrace mentioned “discussions with Thoma Bravo have terminated,” placing an finish to the £6bn ($6.9m) deal that might have been one of the vital important M&A of 2022.
Darktrace had entered dialogue in August concerning a doable takeover by the fairness large, giving Thoma Bravo till September 12, 2022 to announce a agency intention to make a suggestion for Darktrace or not, in accordance with the UK’s Metropolis Code on Takeovers and Mergers, as reported by Infosecurity Journal.
The buyout fell via hours earlier than the Cambridge-based firm mentioned that thousands and thousands of kilos in income had been wrongly acknowledged on this yr’s accounts as an alternative of final yr’s and made a £3.3m ($3.8m) accounts restatement
On the night time of Wednesday September 7, Thoma Bravo pulled out of talks, saying “an settlement couldn’t be reached on the phrases of a agency provide.” The Telegraph confirmed that the US fairness agency “was not conscious of the accounts restatement.”
On September 8, the British agency launched its first monetary outcomes report as a publicly traded firm, on the identical day Darktrace’s shares plunged 31% in worth to 346 pence a share.
In 2012, Darktrace co-founder Mike Lynch was accused of inflating the worth of his earlier firm Autonomy, which was bought to Hewlett Packard in 2011 for $11bn. He’s preventing extradition to the US on fraud prices.
