Background
Businesses are handling more data every year, and they want to do more with it. Because of this, the Sumeru team has developed investment themes around Big Data management for large enterprises and explored opportunities among companies that help businesses organize and analyze these growing pools of data.
Talend is a software company that helps some of the world’s best-known companies manage and integrate various types of data with unique, “code-generating” architecture. When the company in 2010 set out to find a partner to help with international expansion, a strategic acquisition, and growth capital, they chose Silver Lake Sumeru because of the firm’s successful track record developing sales, marketing, and product development strategies for enterprise software companies, and our expertise in helping businesses expand globally.
Value Creation
We worked closely with the founders and executive team at Talend to develop a strategy for international expansion, make sales and marketing operations more efficient, integrate a complementary acquisition, and streamline the organization to support growth.
The Sumeru team helped Talend’s sales and marketing team attract and retain more customers and working with its management team on product strategies that enabled Talend to deliver capabilities in fully hosted cloud models.
We recruited several C-suite executives that helped the company scale effectively and enabled a very successful IPO.
As the business transitioned toward strong organic revenue growth and positive cash flow, we arranged a line of credit for Talend and completed a complementary acquisition that gave Talend more presence in Europe.
Results
After experiencing rapid growth and increasing stature in the market, Talend went public in July of 2016 (NASDAQ: TLND). In the years leading up to its IPO, when Talend worked in partnership with Sumeru to streamline and expand its business, the company’s recurring revenues grew over 6X with improved profitability and cash flow. During that same period, the company nearly doubled its workforce and added significantly to its global enterprise accounts. The same year it debuted on the public markets, Talend was named a Leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, becoming the first new vendor in five years to achieve that distinction.
“The Sumeru team have been great partners in helping Talend become a leader in data integration software. In addition to providing capital to fund the strong growth of our business, they were valued thought partners to me in every step of the journey toward our successful IPO.”
– Mike Tuchen, CEO
The testimonials of current or past portfolio company executives are provided as illustrative examples and designed to demonstrate the benefits to portfolio companies of partnering with us. These testimonials are primarily aimed at prospective portfolio companies and not intended to solicit investors. The portfolio companies covered in these testimonials do not represent all portfolio company investments we have made. The experiences highlighted in these testimonials are solely those of the executives profiled in these testimonials and may not necessarily represent or be indicative of the current, past or future experiences of other portfolio companies. Past results and experiences discussed in these testimonials are not indicative, or a guarantee of future results and experiences. We have not provided cash or other type of compensation in exchange for receiving these testimonials. We do not believe there are typically any material conflicts associated with providing these testimonials. The compensation of our portfolio company executives is primarily driven by the performance of their respective portfolio companies and any discretion we exercise in such compensation determinations is not influenced by whether an executive has provided a favorable testimonial. Additionally, the economic interests of our portfolio companies’ executives are generally well-aligned with ours and those of our investors. Nevertheless, the fact that these testimonials have been provided by individuals whose compensation we exercise a certain level of control over may incentivize them to provide favorable evaluations of their experiences working with us.