Houlihan Lokey Advises MariaDB

Houlihan Lokey is pleased to announce that MariaDB Corp. Ab (MariaDB) has raised $104 million in Series D equity financing to support the continued growth of the company. The private placement transaction closed on February 1, 2022.

Along with the Series D private placement, MariaDB has announced its intention to become a publicly listed company on the New York Stock Exchange in partnership with NYSE-listed Angel Pond Holdings Corp. This transaction implies a pro forma MariaDB enterprise value of approximately $672 million.

Founded in 2013 with dual headquarters in Espoo, Finland, and Redwood City, California, MariaDB is one of the most popular and fastest growing open-source database management software providers in the world. The company’s offering is commercialized via database as a service (DBaaS), on-premise deployment, and public cloud and hybrid models. MariaDB has a strong existing base of blue-chip customers, including 75% of Fortune 500 companies. MariaDB’s features allow it to compete favorably with legacy databases, such as IBM Db2 and Oracle, and with databases provided by the public clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. MariaDB is at the nexus of open-source software and cloud, and its next growth phase will be primed by the NYSE listing and enhanced capital access.

Houlihan Lokey served as lead financial advisor and placement agent to MariaDB and assisted in marketing, structuring, and negotiating the transaction on behalf of the company. Houlihan Lokey contacted a range of software growth equity investors as well as a select group of strategic buyers, which ultimately yielded both actionable minority investment and control offers. The new investors involved in the capital raise included international and U.S.-based enterprise software focused investors.

This transaction highlights Houlihan Lokey’s success and momentum in growth equity capital raises and advising companies in the data management and infrastructure software space. This is the fourth transaction within the past 12 months in the data infrastructure software space. Houlihan Lokey has also advised Exago BI on its sale to insightsoftware, Kingland Systems on its capital raise, and Brainspace on its sale to K1 Investment Management.