AvePoint, Microsoft 365 data management solutions provider, announces $2B merger

Jersey City headquartered AvePoint Inc., the largest data management solutions provider for the Microsoft cloud, said Nov. 23 it is going public through a merger with blank-check company Apex Technology Acquisition Corp. in deal valuing the equity value of the combined company at $2 billion.

Upon closing the transaction, it is expected that the combined company will be named AvePoint. The combined company will be led by Dr. Tianyi Jiang, AvePoint’s co-founder and CEO, and AvePoint co-founder Kai Gong will serve as executive chairman.

From its origin of two coders in a Somerset library, AvePoint has grown to serve the largest software-as-a-service userbase in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem with more than 7 million cloud users as of Sept. 30, 2020 and an estimated addressable market of $33 billion by 2022 according to IDC.

The company sells directly to large and mid-market enterprises, and its solutions are also available to managed services providers on more than 100 cloud marketplaces globally.

AvePoint expects to generate approximately $148 million in total revenue for the year ending Dec. 31, 2020, which would be an increase of approximately 26% over 2019 revenue.

Over its nearly 20 year history, AvePoint has been first to market with many digital collaboration technologies, such as SharePoint migration, automated Microsoft Teams management, and the ability to migrate Microsoft Teams/Slack chats into the target channel.

The Company launched another first-to-market product during COVID-19–a SaaS solution to provide sensitivity-based security insights and automated policy enforcement to prevent risky oversharing in Microsoft 365. More than half of AvePoint’s workforce are technologists, including the majority of the senior leadership team.

“The impact of COVID-19 and the growth of Microsoft’s cloud solutions, including Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, have accelerated demand for our products,” Jiang said. “Going public now gives us the ability to meet this demand and scale up faster across product innovation, channel marketing, international markets, and customer success initiatives.”

Apex is led by former Oracle CFO Jeff Epstein and former Goldman Sachs Head of Technology Investment Banking Brad Koenig. Their combined experience includes more than 100 technology IPOs and mergers involving companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and Twilio.