MariaDB announced it has gone public through a SPAC deal and is now listed as “MRDB” on the New York Stock Exchange.
The completed merger with Angel Pond Holdings has resulted in MariaDB Plc, an Irish public limited company with dual headquarters in Redwood City, California and Dublin, Ireland. Michael Howard will continue to lead MariaDB as CEO, along with the current MariaDB management team.
“Today is an exciting day that marks a new chapter for MariaDB and an important milestone in the cloud industry,” said Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB plc. “Our customers increasingly come to us because they are struggling with the scalability and availability offered by the hyperscalers. With MariaDB SkySQL, we deliver better price and performance while freeing businesses from vendor lock-in with a multi-cloud offering. I am incredibly proud to work with our talented team and our investors as we continue to build success in the cloud for companies around the world.”
The SPAC company Angel Pond was founded by former Goldman Sachs partner Theodore T. Wang, Ph.D., and Shihuang “Simon” Xie, who co-founded Alibaba. Wang joined MariaDB’s board of directors as part of the deal.
“I am thrilled to bring MariaDB to the public market. The MariaDB database is one of the most popular and is proving to be a critical ingredient for businesses’ success in their cloud transformations. With MariaDB’s differentiated product offering and extensive experience building world-class databases, the company is positioned well to support the tidal wave of cloud database migrations that are only just beginning,” said Wang in a statement.
MariaDB was founded in 2009 as a fork of MySQL after being acquired by Oracle as part of the Sun Microsystems acquisition. Its SkySQL open source database is a fully managed cloud database service where customers can deploy and manage the company’s products including MariaDB Enterprise Server, Xpand distributed SQL, ColumnStore, and Serverless Analytics powered by Apache Spark SQL.
The intent to go public via this SPAC deal was announced in February along with a $104 million Series D venture round, giving the company an implied value of $672 million at the time. The company’s market capitalization was $368 million upon its trading debut this week.
Some have said MariaDB made this deal just in time. SPAC deals such as this one seem to be slowing down. According to S&P Global Market Intelligence data, there were 78 SPAC IPOs in the first three quarters of 2022, compared to 444 in the same period a year ago. The aggregate value of SPAC offerings is also down from the previous year, with IPOs raising a combined $12.78 billion in the first three quarters of 2022 compared to $127.27 billion in 2021.
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