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Brightcove, a cloud platform that helps businesses manage and monetize video content, is being taken private by Italian technology company Bending Spoons in an all-cash deal valued at $233 million.
The transaction prices Brightcove at $4.45 per share, translating to a 90% premium on its 60-day average.
Founded out of Boston in 2004, Brightcove develops tools and services for creating, hosting, streaming, marketing, and monetizing video content, with clients including Marriott Hotels, Ford, and Johnson & Johnson. The company, which went public on the Nasdaq in 2012 at $11 per share, hasn’t had a fruitful time of late — its most recent earnings revealed revenues were down 2% on the year previous, while net losses widened by 22%. Brightcove’s market cap also hit an all-time low of $72 million earlier this year, though it recently rebounded to a 12-month high of $143 million — all in all, though, the company hasn’t had a great time of it with Wall Street.
“As the Board considered the long-term path for Brightcove, we unanimously determined that this transaction represents the best opportunity to maximize the value of the business and deliver compelling, certain, and immediate cash value to our stockholders,” Brightcove board chair Diane Hessan said in a statement issued today.
Bending Spoons, for its part, is a Baillie Gifford-backed mobile app development company that has become known for various notable acquisitions in recent years. This includes Evernote, which it bought in 2022 before laying off 129 of its employees; and WeTransfer, which it bought back in July shortly before sacking 75% of its 350 workforce.
Elsewhere, Bending Spoons bought popular video app Filmic in 2022, before laying off the entirety of the staff a year later. And shortly after closing its acquisition of community-building platform Meetup in January, Bending Spoons’ co-founder and CEO Luca Ferrari announced it was “significantly reducing” Meetup’s U.S. headcount.
So there is a clear trend from the past couple of years that might not bode well for Brightcove, though it’s too early to tell what the outcome will be here.
This latest acquisition, though, signals Bending Spoons’ entry to the enterprise SaaS market, and represents its first ever acquisition of a publicly-traded company. Ferrari said that Brightcove is a “respected name in the streaming technology space,” according to the press release.
“When Bending Spoons acquires a business, we do so with the intention of owning and operating it indefinitely,” Ferrari said. “With this in mind, we’re excited about building on the strong work of the current team, and ensuring Brightcove thrives for many years to come.”
The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2025, and is still subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.
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