Prosus, the international assets holding arm of South African multinational consumer internet company Naspers, has acquired Stack Overflow, a Q&A platform for developers, for a whopping $1.8 billion.
The acquisition was announced recently by the co-founders of Stack Overflow – Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, on the micro-blogging site Twitter.
An exciting day! @spolsky called me and let me know. Today’s sale of Stack Overflow, most importantly, lets Stack Overflow continue as an independent site — and also mints 61 new millionaires.
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) June 2, 2021
New blog post: Kinda a big announcement https://t.co/HiD4C4DUNU
— Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) June 2, 2021
The strategic acquisition was part of Prosus’s efforts to strengthen its position in the education technology sector and expand its footprint. Post the acquisition, Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently with its current team.
Founded by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008, Stack Overflow provides a platform for professional and aspiring developers to get answers to the toughest coding questions, share knowledge with their co-workers in private, and find their next dream job. The company’s products include the SaaS knowledge sharing and collaboration platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, and a recruiting platform for great developers, a ‘Reach and Relevance’ platform for getting developers excited about the company’s products.
Announcing the news in a blog post, Joel Spolsky, Co-founder, Ex-CEO, and now Chairman of the board of Stack Overflow, wrote,
“Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices.”
Spolsky added, “Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.”
The deal is most likely to close by the end of the third quarter, subject to regulatory approvals.
Organizations such as Bloomberg, Microsoft, Expensify, and others partner with Stack Overflow to centralize information, increase efficiency, and build faster.
According to a press statement, Prosus can help accelerate Stack Overflow’s growth ambitions, with a particular focus on reaching a wider international community, while also further scaling the company’s Teams product to position Stack Overflow at the center of product and technology development within major enterprises globally.
Prosus is one of the world’s leading technology investors with stakes in companies such as Tencent, Brainly, BYJU’s, Udemy, Codecademy, OLX, PayU, and Remitly, among others. Its mission is to build leading companies that empower and enrich communities.
