Qualtrics acquired for $12.5 billion by Silver Lake and CPP Investments

Last week we wrote about Qualtrics after the survey software company received a $12.4 billion buyout offer from Silver Lake and Canada’s CPPIB. Today, Silver Lake and CPP Investments announced it plans to acquire Qualtrics for $12.5 billion, making it the second time the company has been bought in less than 5 years.

In a statement, the two companies said they will acquire 100% of Qualtrics’ outstanding shares. The acquisition includes the majority ownership interest of SAP, which acquired Qualtrics for $8 billion in 2018.

According to the transaction agreement, Qualtrics will become a privately held company and its common stock will no longer be listed on public markets once the transaction is complete. In addition, Qualtrics will continue to be led by Chief Executive Officer Zig Serafin, and the company will remain headquartered in Provo, Utah, and Seattle, Washington, the companies said in a statement released on Monday.

“I couldn’t be more excited for this step in our journey,” said Ryan Smith, Qualtrics Founder and Executive Chairman. “Silver Lake’s belief in our vision and their amazing track record of helping founders and management teams speaks for itself. We look forward to working together and driving category-defining growth to build the next great enterprise cloud platform.”

“Qualtrics is becoming central to how businesses make mission-critical customer and employee decisions that increase revenue and operational efficiency. With our AI-powered platform and automated actions, we help companies deliver exceptional experiences and build deep relationships with their customers and employees at scale,” said Zig Serafin, Chief Executive Officer at Qualtrics. “We are incredibly excited to partner with the team at Silver Lake, who deeply understand our business and will help us continue to build a high-performing company, invest in our innovation and expand our ecosystem to help our customers succeed.”

“We are strong believers in the amazing technology platform that Ryan, Zig and their phenomenal engineering and sales teams are building, and we’re thrilled to support the continued efficient growth of Qualtrics into a generational, highly profitable platform company by enabling further investment across all aspects of the business, including areas such as AI and other powerful new technologies,” said Egon Durban, Co-CEO of Silver Lake. “This is a landmark transaction for Silver Lake, reflecting our confidence in the team and their vision. As they shape and continue to grow the next great enterprise software platform, they are the kind of leaders we have been most excited to partner with over many years of technology investing.”

“Silver Lake has both the operational expertise and the track record with software companies to help Qualtrics extend its leadership in the XM category it pioneered,” said Christian Klein, CEO and Member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “Since we acquired Qualtrics in 2019 the company has more than tripled its revenue while delivering profitability. SAP intends to remain a close go-to-market and technology partner, servicing joint customers and continuing to contribute to Qualtrics’s success. The number of companies and brands using Qualtrics software has risen from 10,000 at the time of SAP’s purchase to over 18,000 today.”

“We would like to thank SAP for their stewardship of Qualtrics over the past four years,” said Kyle Paster, Managing Director at Silver Lake. “We are pleased to be joined by a high quality investor and bank group in supporting Ryan, Zig and the rest of the Qualtrics team with a low leverage capital structure designed to fuel the company’s next stage of growth, broadening the power of the Qualtrics technology platform.”

Qualtrics is a software maker which competes with SurveyMonkey in the survey software market. Qualtrics is a competitor of SurveyMonkey. However, Qualtrics has a much richer feature set than SurveyMonkey. Qualtrics has grown faster over the years and is also more profitable.

Qualtrics was originally founded in 2002 by Jared Smith, Ryan Smith, and Stuart Orgill. The company provides a technology platform that organizations use to collect, manage, and act on experience data, also called X-data. The Qualtrics XM Platform is a system of action, used by teams, departments, and entire organizations to manage the four core experiences of business—customer, product, employee, and brand—on one platform.

Over 9,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 U.S. business schools, rely on Qualtrics to consistently build products that people love, create more loyal customers, develop a phenomenal employee culture, and build iconic brands.