Thoma Bravo has agreed to acquire PROS, a prominent AI-powered pricing and revenue management software provider.
The all-cash deal is valued at approximately $1.4BN and is expected to close during the fourth quarter.
It is Thoma Bravo's third acquisition in just a matter of weeks, following the roll-ups of Dayforce and Verint in late August.
Yet, PROS brings new capabilities to its portfolio, including CPQ (configure, price, quote), price optimization, and revenue intelligence solutions.
In announcing the deal, Jeff Cotten, President and CEO of PROS, stated that as a private company, "PROS will be more agile and have greater flexibility to invest in innovation and expand our platform."
It will also gain the luxury of focusing on longer-term goals, like leading the emerging field of agentic intelligence and analytics, as it no longer has to manage for short-term quarterly results.
Nevertheless, what most excites Martin Schneider, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, is how PROs fits into the broader Thoma Bravo portfolio.
"Thoma Bravo continues to build out a sizable portfolio of applications providers outside of its previous concentration in cybersecurity," he noted. "It will be interesting to see how well they can continue to drive momentum for PROS as a private equity-backed company.
"PROS has been making significant inroads in the hospitality and airline industries, but its recent investments in AI have made its pricing and CPQ offerings for B2B very compelling," continued Schneider.
When we look at Thoma Bravo's portfolio, they have the makings of a CPQ and revenue operations powerhouse, considering they are also the majority owners in Coupa and Conga software. How much the company wants to "mix and match" among its portfolio to create new offerings remains to be seen, but they have assembled quite a list of solid SaaS solutions for key elements of the go-to-market tech stack.
To Schneider's point, alongside its cybersecurity heritage, Thoma Bravo is building quite the portfolio, in revenue operations, as he mentions, but also in customer engagement. In these spaces, other firms in the space are struggling to stand out. As such, its acquisition streak opens the door to some creative combinations.
