Mailgun: Announcing Strategic Growth Investment from Thoma Bravo | Hacker News Reader

Mailgun: Announcing Strategic Growth Investment from Thoma Bravo

mailgun.com

29 pointsyalooze11 comments

Mailgun was a YC W11 company: https://www.ycdb.co/company/mailgun

The original founders have moved on and put a second company through YC S15 called Gravitational: https://www.ycdb.co/company/gravitational

I feel this is April Fools. Perhaps this line gives it away: "As of today, we’re changing our name to Meowgun and focusing entirely on streamlining communication between cats and their owners."

Actually, they clarify just below that while they are kidding on the guidance, the acquisition is of course real. Hard to announce new news on April 1, especially with humor included.

I can't tell.

Modified on: March 13, 2019

so... search for alternatives ?

Is there something about Thoma Bravo specifically that makes you say that?

Otherwise Mailgun managed to handle being acquired by Rackspace [1], and then spin back out of Rackspace [2] reasonably well...

[1] - https://www.mailgun.com/blog/mailgun-is-being-acquired-by-ra...

[2] - https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/22/mailgun-there-and-back-aga...

this part is in the email "Thoma Bravo is a leading private equity firm" but i don't see it in the blog post.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/23/idera-acquires-travis-ci/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19218036

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/b6l559/travisc...

so just a blanket bias towards "private equity firms"?

Thoma Bravo is a PE firm that is mostly known for "flipping" companies they acquire. Usually the company/product suffers under these kinds of circumstances.

Disclosure: TB bought our company from other PE earlier this year.

So far they are pretty hands-off once the top level metrics around sales, growth, etc are established. We'll see what happens in the future or if we don't meet our targets.

"flipping" is a bit misleading; They'll look to sell in line with the timing of their funds lifespan. This isn't much different from VC looking for a liquidity event within the lifetime of their funds.

Context: I was the M&A lead for the purchase of Mailgun by Rackspace and I also spun a company (Jungle Disk) out of Rackspace so I know this situation well.

If you like how Mailgun has done things over the past two years (under private equity ownership after separating from Rackspace) you'll continue to enjoy using their service.

I view this more like a Series C/D venture investment than I do what most folks consider a "traditional PE investment" though the early stage folks won't look at Mailgun because of the startup -> acquired by public company -> carve-out cap table.

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