Prosus said that in a $1.8 billion transaction, it acquired Stack Overflow, a world-renowned developer technical Q&A community, which is a bet on the growing demand for online technical learning. Stack Overflow is headquartered in New York and attracts more than 100 million visitors every month.
Prosus is one of Europe's most valuable technology companies and is known as the largest shareholder of Tencent Holdings Ltd., the Chinese internet and video game giant. Prosus went public in Amsterdam and sold a small portion of its stake in Tencent for US$14.6 billion in April, demonstrating its desire for transactions. The Stack Overflow transaction is one of Prosus' largest acquisitions.
Prosus invests in a series of online platforms around the world, with a focus on areas such as food distribution, classified information, and financial technology. It also holds more than US$200 billion of shares in Tencent. Prosus' parent company Naspers Ltd. acquired shares in Tencent in 2001. The company acquired shares in Tencent in 2001 for US$34 million.
The Stack Overflow transaction is Prosus' first direct acquisition in the education technology field. Prosus already owns shares in two educational technology companies-Udemy and Codecademy-service companies. It will invest in Skillsoft, a publisher of training software used by companies, as part of a plan to merge the company with Churchill Capital Corp II, a special-purpose acquisition company, and go public in New York.
Larry Illg, who is in charge of education technology investment at Prosus, said: "The pandemic has brought this field to the fore. What we will see in the next few months is a wave of integration that will push the company to make acquisitions, otherwise it may lose its target. ."
Prosus is acquiring Stack Overflow from the company’s founding venture capital investors, including Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Bezos Expeditions (an investment arm of Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos), Spark Capital, Silver Lake and GIC (Singapore Sovereign Wealth Fund).
The Stack Overflow website is free to visit. Its advertising revenue comes from companies that promote technology products and solicit potential technical employees. The company also offers a subscription-based software-as-a-service product called Stack Overflow for Teams for businesses that want to access a private version of a public platform for their employees to collaborate. The product's features include the ability to integrate with other tools, such as GitHub, a programming collaboration website that Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018.
Siemens, Chevron, Microsoft, and Liberty Mutual Group are among the companies that use Stack Overflow for Teams, said Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of the company.
Prosus aims to expand the geographic scope of the platform to include developing markets like India, where it has successfully expanded online platforms such as its PayU payment company.
Mr. Chandrasekar said, "The ability to replicate this success internationally is a huge focus of this transaction."
The two companies said that Stack Overflow will also gain business customers from Prosus' other portfolio companies in the education technology field.
The following is the content of the official Stack Overflow blog
As you may have seen in the news this morning, Prosus (PROSY) has announced its intention to acquire Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion. This is very exciting news for our employees, customers, community members and our shareholders. I will share more about the significance of all this in this article.
Prosus is one of the world's leading technology investors and owns shares in companies such as Tencent, Brainly, BYJU's, Codecademy, OLX, PayU, Remitly and Udemy. Their huge scale and influence have improved the lives of about one-fifth of the world’s population. Prosus' mission is to build leading companies, empower and enrich communities, as evidenced by their cooperation with many community-focused companies and educational technology companies. This makes Prosus the perfect company to acquire Stack Overflow, and Stack Overflow is their ideal investment focusing on future workplace learning and collaboration. It enables us to continue to operate as an independent company, with our existing team, and with the support of a global technological power.
Once this acquisition is completed, we will have more resources and support to develop our public platform and paid products, and we can greatly accelerate our global influence. This may seem like faster and stronger international expansion, merger and acquisition opportunities, and deeper collaboration within Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow for Teams. Our goal is to make our public platform a valuable resource for developers and technical experts everywhere, and let our SaaS collaboration and knowledge management platform Stack Overflow for Teams cover more global enterprises, and let them accelerate product innovation and increase product innovation by releasing institutional knowledge. increase productivity.
Prosus is a long-term investor and loves what our company and community have built over the past 13 years. They are impressed by the company's SaaS transformation since the launch of Stack Overflow for Teams, especially in the past two years. Prosus recognizes the huge impact potential of our platform, and they are very happy to launch and accelerate our next phase of development.
In the next few weeks or months, how you use our website and our products will not change, just as our company’s goals and strategic priorities remain unchanged. As the acquisition is finalized and we continue to work with Prosus, I will keep you informed through my regular quarterly blog post, and our Chief Product and Technology Officer Teresa Dietrich will do the same in her quarterly community blog post .
Finally, I want to thank all of you for your contributions over the years. Whether you ask or answer questions on our website, or simply copy and paste the code, whether you have ever found a job on Stack Overflow, or you are one of the hundreds of thousands of users of Stack Overflow for Teams. Without you, we could not achieve this milestone.
This milestone is just the beginning. Since 2008, our public platform has helped developers and technical experts more than 50 billion times. This is just the beginning of us, and I can’t wait to continue to tell you about the next step.
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