California-based Talend will be acquired by Qlik. The transaction is a very Philly tech scene story

The story goes back about seven years — and nearly as many acquisitions.

A team of technologists behind data analytics darling RJMetrics can be traced to this moment in 2023. When RJMetrics was acquired in 2016 by ecommerce company Magento (which was later bought by Adobe), it spun out data analytics startup Stitch with support from RJMetrics’ largest investors, namely August Capital and Trinity Ventures.

The transactions don’t stop there. Just a year after Stitch was founded, in 2018, it was acquired by California-based Talend, makers of a cloud data integration solution. The deal included Stitch’s CEO and cofounder Jake Stein becoming SVP of a Stitch business unit within Talend, and CTO Merrick becoming Talend’s VP of product and engineering (later CTO).

The Philly team stayed in tact — and in fact, expanded — in 2020, doubling its engineering and product team and growing to about 50 area technologists.

“The responsibility of product and engineering is growing beyond what we were doing at Stitch,” Merrick said at the time. “We’re building a team to work on enhancing some of the intelligence and automation throughout Talend’s cloud products.”

The Stitch team pre-2018 acquisition. (Courtesy photo)

Then in 2021, news for the company struck again: Talend would be acquired by Thoma Bravo, a leading private equity investment firm focused on software and technology-enabled services sectors, in a $2.4 billion.

Stein and Merrick would ultimately launch their own ventures — Stein with 2021-founded contract management platform Common Paper (which, hey, is entering the latest cohort of Y Combinator next week) and Merrick with 2022-founded Omni, which makes a data analytics tool.

Need a minute to catch up? Take a breath? Let’s keep going.

Now, at the start of 2023, more transition is coming. Thoma Bravo-owned, King of Prussia-based Qlik announced Thursday it intended to acquire Talend. Both companies work with real-time data and application integration, data governance, data quality, transformation, analytics, AI and machine learning. No financial details of the deal were shared, and it would be expected to close in the first half of the year.

“We are excited about this proposal to have two of our leading portfolio companies join forces to accelerate the vision of making a difference in the world through data,” said Seth Boro, a managing partner at Thoma Bravo, in a statement. “The proposed combination of these two growing and profitable businesses, under the leadership of [Qlik CEO] Mike Capone, would have significant global scale and an unparalleled product portfolio.”

Stein, who left before Thoma Bravo acquired Talend, told Technical.ly he knew a few folks who had suspected this acquisition was coming.

“In some ways, this represents things coming full circle to the original RJMetrics model, where the same company provides both data integration and data visualization tools,” he said.

The multi-time founder said that when his former leadership team began work on Stitch years ago, and even with RJMetrics, they had a good sense of who might want to acquire them someday. But all the “subsequent acquisitions” were more of a surprise.

Though the company’s been through many iterations since Stitch was founded in Philadelphia, the current Philly-based Talend team is still going strong, its VP of corporate marketing, Chris Taylor, said in an email. About 60 employees are currently based in the area, up from about 50 when Technical.ly checked in on the company in 2021. The majority of those are on technical teams, either engineers or product managers, Taylor said.

“It’s too early in the process to speculate on what it may mean for individual teams or locations,” Taylor said of the forthcoming acquisition. “I would, however, say that the potential of the union of Talend and Qlik has many of us salivating.”

He added that combining forces has the potential to create a “one-stop shop to power the entire data lifecycle and efficiently turn raw data into business outcomes.”

So while the acquisitions and transactions have made some once-Philly companies a bit more global, local tech talent — some of which comes from the early days of RJMetrics and Stitch — is still very much powering these growing companies.