Zuora, a company selling software to help businesses manage their subscription-based services, has agreed to be acquired by private equity firms GIC and Silver Lake for $1.7 billion.
The all-cash deal is expected to close in Q1 2025, subject to approvals and customary closing conditions. It’ll take Zuora, which is currently publicly traded, private; Tien Tzuo, Zuora’s CEO and chairman, will continue to lead the company.
“Since our founding, Zuora has evangelized the shift to the subscription economy and evolution to complex revenue models, providing technology necessary to monetize products and services,” Tzuo said in a press release. “As a private company, with the support and expertise of Silver Lake and GIC, our monetization suite will continue to lead in the marketplace.”
Tzuo, along with K.V. Rao and Cheng Zou, founded Redwood City, California-based Zuora in 2007. Rao and Zou were engineers at WebEx, while Tzuo was chief strategy and marketing officer at Salesforce.
The idea behind Zuora was a platform for orchestrating a businesses’ various billing systems, with an emphasis on subscription management. Over the past decade, Zuora has slowly expanded its offerings through mergers and acquisitions, purchasing subscription invoicing and billing startup Frontleaf, subscription experience platform Zephr, and revenue recognition software provider Leeyo.
Today, Zuora offers tools to assist companies in keeping track of subscription payments, pricing, and accounting, and a marketplace of apps built on top of Zuora’s services. Most recently, Zuora launched a product to automate the process of reconciling and analyzing revenue while enabling firms to measure the impact of their subscription businesses.
Before going public in 2018, Zuora raised $250 million in venture capital from investors including Benchmark, Greylock, and Marc Benioff. In August, the ~1,500-employee company’s market cap was hovering around $1.39 billion.
In its most recent fiscal quarter (Q2 2025), Zuora beat expectations, reporting adjusted earnings per share of 19 cents, up from seven cents in Q2 2024, on revenue of $115.4 million, up 7% year-over-year.
“Zuora’s best-in-class software powers the revenue engines for many of the largest and most exciting companies today,” said Choo Yong Cheen, chief investment officer of private equity at GIC, and Eric Wilmes, head of private equity, Americas at GIC, said in a joint statement. “With rapid growth in the subscription economy, company requirements are becoming increasingly complex. Having established the category, Zuora’s products and experience position it for continued market leadership.”
Zuora’s acquisition comes on the heels of another major take-private PE deal. This morning, Permira completed its acquisition of Squarespace after upping its bid to $7.2 billion.
PE mega-deals have surged this year, on track to challenge the 22-year record set in 2021. In Q2, PE firms announced 122 deals worth $196 billion, making it the strongest period for PE capital deployment since the downturn began in Q3 2022, according to EY.
