Sage Group buys Intacct accounting software for $850M

British enterprise software company Sage Group has agreed to purchase Intacct, a 19-year-old accounting software company, for $850 million, the companies announced today.

A cash and stock transaction, the deal aims to help build out Sage’s cloud financial management offerings.

Intacct, which competes with Financial Force and Oracle’s NetSuite, said in a related statement that it now has 11,000 customers for its enterprise resource planning software. Its revenue for its fiscal year ending in June 2016 was $67 million, with pre-tax losses of $23 million.

The exit was a long-time coming for Intacct. The San Jose-based outfit had raised more than $130 million in equity funding, dating back to 2000. Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners and Emergence Capital were among its backers. Its most recent round, a Series G that closed in early 2014, valued the company at $211 million, according to PitchBook data.

“This is an ‘overnight success’ many years in the making,” Bessemer Venture Partners’ Byron Deeter quipped. An investor and former board member, he believes “Intacct is at the scale where they could be a public company today, but instead chose to partner with Sage given the nature of the deal, and the opportunity to have a broader impact together.”

Many late-stage enterprise software startups have been going the IPO route, but large acquisitions in the space will also help the valuations of comparable companies.

This is the third startup Sage Group has acquired this year. 

Featured Image: Rrraum/Shutterstock