Corona Exit: American Netapp storage acquires Israeli startup Spot for about $ 450 million

Another huge exit at the door: Netapp storage and data company reports that it is acquiring Israeli startup sppot.
Netap is a NASDAQ publicly traded company for $ 10 billion. It did not report the purchase amount as it is not material to it in reporting terms (less than 10% of its balance sheet), but it is estimated to be a $ 450 million deal. The deal was heated Wednesday evening. Negotiations to purchase it began in February.
Spot has developed a system that helps companies save cloud computing costs by "zapping" between servers, and taking advantage of the discounted rates that cloud providers (such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft) give their "surplus", which means unused servers they offer at a discount.
Spot's software recognizes and predicts the availability of discounted resources, and automatically and seamlessly transfers the work to them, without compromising its customer performance.
"If Amazon has a lot of servers, and it doesn't sell them at any given moment, it can offer you to buy the excess server volume at a discount of up to 80%," explained company CEO Amiram Shahar in a conversation with TheMarker. You are not making any commitment. Amazon actually says, "When I want to, I'll kick you off the server." Our company is able to predict in advance when the server provider - such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft - will disconnect the client, and transfer it to another server before it happens. "
Spot was founded in 2015 by Amiram Shahar, Liran Pollack and Aaron Toiser. Prior to founding the company, the three served in the IDF Mamram Unit in the Computing Centers Division. It employs about 200 people, half of them in Israel.
Spot has raised $ 52 million so far in a number of rounds of fundraising in recent years. Among the company's investors is Highland Capital, which led the latest round of funding; Intel Capital - Intel Investment Fund; Vertex Israel; Springtime Ventures; Eli Wurtman's Pico Ventures; And Leaders - according to the IVC database. The company has about 200 employees and has offices in Tel Aviv, London and San Francisco.
Israel's most recent fundraising was in 2018, when it raised $ 35 million. Her recruitment, which was her most significant, was designed to help her develop her technology and reach the market.
According to market estimates, the company now generates tens of millions of dollars a year, at the high threshold of $ 100 million. Before that, the company had three rounds of funding: $ 600,000, $ 2 million in 2016 led by the Pico Ventures Fund, and as mentioned above, $ 15 million raised by Intel Capital and the Vertex Foundation.
Netap acquires a presence in Israel based on previous acquisitions it made: In 2017, it acquired Plexistor, which developed memory technology. About two years later, she bought Cognino for $ 70 million.
 Spot.io's technology, using algorithms developed, identifies the cheapest computing resources of the surplus sold by major cloud service providers. Today, these companies often use the services of Israeli spot and similar companies in order to optimize the use of their services and even to retain their customers. Israeli company estimates server costs for their customers and offers them the best prices they can find at the time. It also allows companies that operate on multiple parallel clouds - such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft - to unite them under a single UI.
A key part of the Israeli spot company software is a control system that regularly and constantly checks the services that its customers receive, thus alerting them if the cloud company in which they are storing, changing prices or considering removing them from its cloud. The company has thousands of customers, including leading companies in Israel and worldwide such as Sony, Unilever and Samsung.
Spot's expected exit joins a series of recent exits in the Israeli tech market, which included, among other things, Optimal Plus's National Instruments sales of $ 365 million, and of course the spoken sale of Mobit's $ 1 billion acquisition of Intel.