Jyoti Bansal
AppDynamics
Application performance monitoring (APM) software · San Francisco, California
Portrait: Unknown authorUnknown author / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0
The founder
Jyoti Bansal, an IIT Delhi graduate who moved to the U.S. on an H-1B visa, founded AppDynamics in San Francisco in 2008 after working at startups including Wily Technology. He built it into a leading application-monitoring platform used by large enterprises, owning roughly 14% of the company at exit. The Cisco deal — struck the night before AppDynamics’ Nasdaq debut — turned around 400 employees into millionaires. Bansal went on to found Harness, a DevOps software company later valued above $1.7 billion.
How it was sold
Cisco swooped in with a $3.7 billion cash-and-equity offer on January 24, 2017, one day before AppDynamics was set to price its IPO at an expected valuation under $2 billion — meaning the acquisition price came in roughly double what public markets were about to value the company at, one of the most dramatic "IPO-to-acquisition pivot" stories in enterprise software.
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In the news
Coverage of the AppDynamics deal from independent outlets — read the original reporting, not just our summary.
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