Hungry private equity eyeing up Commvault

Private equity business Thoma Bravo and others are looking to acquire Commvault, according to Reuters, which reported that the company is exploring its options with Goldman Sachs.

Commvault is a enterprise-class data protection and cyber-resilience business that has enjoyed solid growth since 2023, with an adoption of SaaS-based data protection, since CEO Sanjay Mirchandani took over in 2019. He overhauled sales and go-to-market and the company earned record revenues in its latest quarter (Q3 FY 2026) of $314 million, with ARR breaking the $1 billion barrier. However, the company announced a restructuring program to optimize costs at the end of the quarter. 

The company’s guided growth prospects underwhelmed analysts and investors and its share price dropped 30 percent from $129.36 to $89.93 the day after the results announcement. What made this worse was that the stock had been trading around $195.41 in September 2025, and, with it trading down as low as $75.18 two days after the results, a buying opportunity opened up for interested acquirers. 

The stock has now risen to $88.88 since then, following the Reuters report, capitalizing Commvault at $3.91 billion.

The back story here is that Commvault was a somewhat languishing legacy data protection vendor until Mirchandani took over. It has been overtaken in size (customer count and revenue) by privately-owned Cohesity, and Veeam, and also Rubrik, which went public two years ago, and is now capitalized at $8.86 billion.

Commvault could possibly do with a greater emphasis on cyber-resilience, Rubrik’s strong point, AI, a Cohesity strength, and greater mid-market presence, a core Veeam capability.

Thoma Bravo has a cyber-security portfolio that includes Darktrace, LogRhythm, Ping Identity, Proofpoint, SailPoint and Sophos. There may be potential synergies here with Commvault.

Unlike activist investors like Elliott Management, PE businesses have a longer-term interest in the companies they acquire.

Cohesity bought the Veritas data protection business from PE business Carlyle in February 2024. Carlyle bought Veritas from Symantec in 2015 for $7.4 billion, holding it for 9 years until the Cohesity deal. Having disposed of Veritas, Carlyle may fancy a punt at another data protection business. 

Veeam is owned by Insight Partners, another PE business, which bought it for around $5 billion in 2020. Adding Commvault’s enterprise customer based-heft to Veeam would solidify its position as top dog in the data protection/cyber-resilience market. Other PE businesses that could be interested in Commvault include Francisco Partners, which has Forcepoint and SonicWall in its portfolio, and Vista Equity Partners, which has Securonix in its grab bag.

Commvault has just promoted its Chief Commercial Officer Gary Merrill to be its new CFO, replacing Jennifer DiRico who resigned in January, before the results statement, to become EVP and CFO at global software supplier PTC. As CCO Merrill led the Sales and Partner organization. 

Geoff Haydon has been hired from being CEO of cybersecurity supplier Ontinue and appointed President of Customer and Field Operations. He will oversee the end-to-end customer experience, from Sales and Partnerships through Customer Support and Success. Haydon has been on Commvault’s Board of Directors, but will leave the Board to focus on his operating role.