By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Splunk (NASDAQ:SPLK) stock was up 2% premarket reacting to a report Friday in The Wall Street Journal that Hellman & Friedman has taken a 7.5% stake worth about $1.4 billion in the software firm.
The stock was up about 2% after WSJ said the private equity firm’s first purchases of the stock happened in mid-late December when several quarters of disappointing results led to the departure of its CEO and a slump in its market cap.
According to the paper, the stake would make Hellman & Friedman the largest active shareholder of Splunk, a nearly $20 billion market cap company. Silver Lake, a PE focused on technology firms, is also a Splunk shareholder.
Demand for security software that firms like Splunk offer have boomed in the pandemic as companies went hybrid and a need for securing remote-placed systems surged.
Last month, according to another report in WSJ, Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) had made a takeover offer worth more than $20 billion for Splunk. The deal didn’t materialize.
The bid had stalled by then and the hiring of a new CEO suggests Splunk plans to go it alone at least for now.
Splunk has a new CEO in Gary Steele. Steele was the CEO of Portera before he founded his own firm Proofpoint (NASDAQ:PFPT), an information security company that PE firm Thoma Bravo bought last year. He has also held various leadership roles at Sybase, Sun Microsystems, and Hewlett-Packard.