Thoma Bravo last year was reported to be raising $35 billion to home in on more acquisition opportunities in the space (and it’s been making a wide number of investments and acquisitions to that end). Their approach to fund a spun-out Workplace last year would have come at a time when late-stage and private equity investors were (and still are) ramping up their activities to snap up big, mature tech businesses. It’s not clear which investors were involved, but a source says that they were among those focused on late-stage, growth round investments with a view to injecting capital specifically in enterprise opportunities. Spokespeople from Meta and Workplace said that they had nothing to share and declined to comment for this article. “It helps make Facebook look like an adult,” the source said. For regulators, it shows that Facebook/Meta is more than just a too-powerful social network and for organizations, that Facebook can do more for them than just sell ads. A deal would have valued a newly independent Workplace as a “unicorn” (at least at $1 billion) according to the source.Ī source tells us that conversations didn’t progress, primarily because Facebook (and now Meta) saw Workplace as a “strategic asset” - not because Workplace generates sales anywhere close to the billions Meta makes from advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but important rather for presenting a more diverse face to the market. We’ve learned that Facebook (before it was rebranded as Meta) was approached by enterprise investors offering the social network a proposition: spin off the organization, they said, and let us back it as a startup. That traction, it turns out, has been giving Workplace attention of another kind. Workplace - the app originally built as a version of Facebook for employees to communicate with each other - now has more than 7 million users, carving out a place for itself as an app to help companies communicate internally using essentially the same tools that have proven sticky in their lives with friends and family.
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