McAfee announced Monday it has reached an agreement to be bought by an investor group in a deal worth more than $14 billion.
The move takes the publicly-traded company private again after the initial public offering of McAfee by Intel and TPG last year.
The company’s colorful founder, John McAfee, had sold his company to Intel in 1987 for a fortune and then faced criminal charges in Tennessee last year for tax evasion before he died by suicide of despair in a Barcelona, Spain, prison last June.
The investor group is made up of Advent International Corp., Permira Advisors, Crosspoint Capital Partners, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, GIC Private Limited and a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
Investors will acquire all outstanding shares of McAfee common stock for $26 a share in an all-cash transaction. That’s a 22% premium over the closing share price of $21.21 on Nov. 4.
McAfee will move forward as a privately held company, a pure-play consumer cybersecurity leader. The McAfee Enterprise business was sold in July for $4.50 a share to Symphony Technology Group equal to $4 billion.
TPG had partnered with Intel in 2017 to extract McAfee from Intel’s core operations and then McAfee went public last year with TPG and Intel remaining as shareholders.
McAfee has 20 million subscribers for its security services globally.
Advent Technology Investment Team Head Bryan Taylor said in a statement that the investors see “tremendous opportunity to build on McAfee’s differentiated technology platform.”
Other investors said there’s a need for personalized online protection services which works well with McAfee’s well-known brand and loyal customer base.
The company’s namesake, John McAfee, founded McAfee in 1987 and sold it to Intel in 2011 for $7.6 billion. He died by suicide in June in a jail cell in Barcelona, Spain, according to officials. His lawyer said he was in despair after spending nine months in prison and facing extradition to the U.S. on tax evasion charges.
He had been arrested in October 2020 after being charged criminally in Tennessee for evading taxes for failing to report income from promoting cryptocurrencies as he did consulting work, charges that carried potential prison times of up to 30 years upon conviction.
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