Splunk Acquisition, Valuation, Funding & Investors
Splunk was acquired by Cisco for $28B in September 2023, a 7.1x multiple on $3.9B of revenue.
Splunk revenue at acquisition
$3.9B
Last twelve months · Sep 2023
Splunk revenue multiple at acquisition
7.1x
EV/Revenue · Sep 2023
Splunk EBITDA multiple at acquisition
66.7x
EV/EBITDA · Sep 2023
About Splunk
Splunk is a San Francisco-headquartered software company delivering observability, security, and analytics platforms that process machine-generated data from cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments. Core products include Splunk Enterprise for data indexing, Splunk Cloud for scalable analytics, Splunk SOAR for security orchestration, and solutions for IT operations, threat detection, and business intelligence. Serving industries like manufacturing, retail, finance, and government, Splunk was founded in 2003, went public in 2012, and was acquired by Cisco in March 2024.
Founded
2003
HQ
San Francisco, CAWebsite
Status
Acquired
Customer focus
B2B & B2G
Revenue model
Subscription
Revenue
$3.9B (Sep 2023)
Valuation
$28B (acquired Sep 2023)
Splunk Acquisition
Splunk was acquired by Cisco for $28B on 21 September 2023.
The acquisition price implies a 7.1x revenue and 66.7x EBITDA multiple on $3.9B of revenue.
Before the acquisition Splunk had raised $40M across 3 funding rounds.
Cisco Systems and Splunk Inc. announced on September 21, 2023 a definitive agreement under which Cisco would acquire Splunk for $157 per share in cash, representing an equity value of approximately $28 billion. The price was a premium of about 31% to Splunk's prior closing price. Cisco described the transaction as its largest acquisition ever and said the combination of Splunk's observability and security analytics with Cisco's networking and security portfolio would create one of the world's largest software companies, help customers apply AI across security and observability data, and be cash-flow positive and gross-margin accretive in the first year after closing. The deal was financed from cash and debt. It received shareholder and regulatory approvals and closed on March 18, 2024, with Splunk chief executive Gary Steele joining Cisco's executive leadership team. Splunk was founded in 2003 and headquartered in San Francisco. Its platform ingests and indexes machine data for security information and event management, IT operations and application observability, sold largely as cloud subscriptions. For its fiscal year ended January 31, 2024 Splunk reported revenue of about $4.2 billion and annual recurring revenue of around $4 billion, with roughly 8,000 employees.
| Acquirer | Date | Type | Price | EV/Revenue | EV/EBITDA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21 Sep 2023 | Strategic M&A | $28B | 7.1x | 66.7x |
Sources: splunk.com, newsroom.cisco.com
Splunk Funding History
Splunk has raised a total of $40M across 3 funding rounds.
Splunk's first fundraising round was a $5M Series A in December 2004. The most recent completed round was a $25M Series C in September 2007.
Splunk funding rounds
| Date | Stage | Investors | Raised | Deal Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 2007 | Series C | Ignition Partners (lead); JK&B Capital; August Capital; Sevin Rosen Funds | $25M | Splunk announced on September 11, 2007 that it had raised $25 million in a Series C round led by Ignition Partners of Bellevue, Washington, with existing investors August Capital, JK&B Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds participating. Ignition partner John Connors, the former chief financial officer of Microsoft, joined the board. The financing brought Splunk's total venture funding to $40 million, after a $5 million Series A in December 2004 and a $10 million Series B in January 2006; unconfirmed reports put the post-money valuation at about $120 million. Splunk said it would use the money to expand internationally and to broaden its product beyond IT troubleshooting into security, compliance and business analytics. In the eighteen months since the general release of its first product the company had signed about 450 paying customers, including Visa and the US Department of Justice, and its software had been downloaded more than 100,000 times under a free licence for small data volumes. Splunk, founded in San Francisco in October 2003 by Michael Baum, Rob Das and Erik Swan, indexes and searches machine-generated data such as server logs and network events. This was the company's last venture round: it became profitable in 2009, listed on NASDAQ in April 2012 at a $1.6 billion valuation and was acquired by Cisco for $28 billion in 2024. |
| Jan 2006 | Series B | JK&B Capital (lead); August Capital; Sevin Rosen Funds | $10M | Splunk announced on January 25, 2006 that it had closed a $10 million Series B financing led by JK&B Capital, with existing investors August Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds participating. Marc Sokol, a partner at JK&B who had previously been a senior marketing executive at Computer Associates and a co-founder of Realia, joined Splunk's board of directors. The round followed a $5 million Series A from August Capital and Sevin Rosen in December 2004 and brought total funding to $15 million. Splunk said the capital would be used to expand sales, marketing and engineering as it moved its IT search software from a free beta toward paid enterprise deployments; the product indexed the logs, configuration files and messages generated by servers, applications and network equipment so that administrators could search and correlate them to diagnose outages and security incidents. Splunk was founded in San Francisco in October 2003 by Michael Baum, Rob Das and Erik Swan, and by early 2006 had several hundred downloads a week and a first set of paying customers. It raised a $25 million Series C led by Ignition Partners in 2007, went public on NASDAQ in April 2012 and was acquired by Cisco for $28 billion in 2024. |
| Dec 2004 | Series A | August Capital; Sevin Rosen Funds | $5M | Splunk raised a $5 million Series A round in December 2004 from August Capital and Sevin Rosen Funds, its first institutional financing; no lead investor was disclosed. August Capital's David Hornik and Sevin Rosen's Nick Sturiale joined the board. The company had been founded in San Francisco in October 2003 by Michael Baum, Rob Das and Erik Swan to build a search engine for machine-generated data, indexing the logs and event streams produced by servers, network devices and applications so that IT staff could troubleshoot problems and monitor systems without writing custom parsers. The Series A funded development of the first product, released in beta in 2005 and generally available in 2006 under a free-download model with paid licences for larger data volumes. The round was followed by a $10 million Series B led by JK&B Capital in January 2006 and a $25 million Series C led by Ignition Partners in September 2007, taking total venture funding to $40 million before the company turned profitable in 2009. Splunk went public on NASDAQ in April 2012, raising $229.5 million at a $1.6 billion valuation, and was acquired by Cisco for $28 billion in March 2024. |
Who has invested in Splunk?
4 investors have backed Splunk across its funding rounds, including August Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, JK&B Capital and Ignition Partners.
Lead investors include Ignition Partners and JK&B Capital.
Splunk Investors
| Investor | HQ | Rounds | Role | First check |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| San Francisco, CA | 3 | Participant | Dec 2004 | |
| Dallas, TX | 3 | Participant | Dec 2004 | |
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Benchmark 350K+ Funding Rounds and Disclosed VC Valuation Multiples
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Start Free TrialAcquisitions by Splunk
Splunk has acquired 14 companies to date.
Last acquisition by Splunk was on November 8th 2022. Splunk acquired TwinWave for undisclosed valuation.
Latest Acquisitions by Splunk
| Description | - | TruSTAR is a Sunnyvale-headquartered intelligence platform for cybersecurity teams integrating threat data via APIs. Founded in 2014, it aggregates feeds from 100 partners including Recorded Future and FireEye, automating detection and response workflows. The cloud-native system supports incident investigations for enterprises in finance and government sectors worldwide. | Flowmill is a San Francisco-headquartered observability platform that captures 100 percent of distributed application traffic in real time without sampling or code modifications. It analyzes network flows, RPC calls, and service dependencies across microservices in Kubernetes and cloud environments. The tool runs with minimal overhead on Linux hosts, providing searchable traces for debugging latency and errors. Flowmill serves engineering teams at tech companies handling petabyte-scale data flows. | Plumbr is a performance monitoring tool for Java applications using patented algorithms and contextual analysis. Acquired by Cisco in 2016, it detects bottlenecks by tracing issues to source code or configurations, providing actionable diagnostics to resolve problems efficiently. | |
| HQ Country | | | |  | |
| HQ City | - | San Francisco, CA | San Francisco, CA | Tallinn | |
| Deal Date | 8 Nov 2022 | 18 May 2021 | 25 Nov 2020 | 20 Oct 2020 | |
| Valuation | undisclosed | $82M | undisclosed | undisclosed | |
| EV/Revenue | |||||
| EV/EBITDA | |||||
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Investments by Splunk
Splunk has invested in 3 companies to date.
Latest investment by Splunk was on July 21st 2021. Splunk invested in Fletch in their $16M Series A round.
Latest Investments by Splunk
| Description | Fletch is a cybersecurity firm building no-code analytics apps for threat monitoring, including the Trending Threats tool that aggregates and prioritizes daily news feeds. Tailored for security teams, it filters global vulnerabilities relevant to specific industries and assets. The platform integrates with SIEM systems for automated alerting on emerging risks. | Insight Engines is a cybersecurity company delivering AI-powered tools for analyzing log data in healthcare, finance, and government sectors. Its platform automates detection of viable use cases within log stores and identifies data suitable for removal to enhance security. Security teams conduct natural language searches on logs to obtain precise answers within seconds while receiving context-aware query suggestions. Major organizations rely on these products daily to extend capabilities beyond SIEM systems. Investors such as August Capital, Google Ventures, and DCVC support the firm's growth in accelerating investigations from days to minutes. | Acalvio Technologies is a Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity firm specializing in autonomous deception. Its ShadowPlex platform deploys AI-generated decoys for identity threat detection, ransomware protection, and OT security across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments. The solution holds 25 patents and serves Fortune 500 companies and US government agencies through direct sales and managed service providers. |
| HQ Country | | | |
| HQ City | San Francisco, CA | San Francisco, CA | San Jose, CA |
| Deal Date | 21 Jul 2021 | 20 Jul 2017 | 26 Jul 2016 |
| Round | Series A | Undisclosed stage | Series B |
| Raised | $16M | $16M | $16M |
| Investors | Erik Swan; August Capital; Real Ventures; Sarah Martin; Greg Martin; DCVC; Simon Crosby | Erik Swan; August Capital; Real Ventures; Sarah Martin; Greg Martin; DCVC; Simon Crosby | GV; Ignition Partners; Eileses Capital; Accel |
| Valuation | undisclosed | undisclosed | undisclosed |
| EV/Revenue | |||
| EV/EBITDA | |||
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Splunk Competitors
Splunk competitors include listed companies like Octave Intelligence and Geovis, and private ones like Celonis, Claroty, ReliaQuest and Temporal Technologies.
| Company | HQ | Status | Revenue | EBITDA | Valuation | Revenue Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Munich | Private | $400M | - | $13B | 32.5x | |
| New York City, NY | Private | $200M | - | $3B | 15.0x | |
| United States | Publicly listed | $1.6B | $530M | $5.3B | 3.5x | |
| Tampa, FL | Private | $300M | - | $3.4B | 11.3x | |
| Seattle, WA | Private | $250M | - | $13B | 50.2x | |
 China | Publicly listed | $399M | $44M | $3.7B | 8.5x |
Splunk Public Comps
Splunk is no longer listed, but its public comps include Hexagon, F5, Dassault Systemes, Rubrik, Verisk Analytics, Zscaler, Okta, Snap-on, Fair Isaac and Wolters Kluwer.
| Last FY | EV/Revenue | EV/EBITDA | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue | EBITDA | Last FY | LTM | 2027E | Last FY | LTM | 2027E | |
| $6.2B | $1.7B | 4.4x | 5.3x | 16.0x | 14.8x | |||
| $3.1B | $901M | 7.9x | 7.2x | 27.2x | 19.3x | |||
| $7.1B | $2.2B | 4.1x | 4.0x | 13.3x | 11.2x | |||
| $1.3B | ($324M) | 17.7x | 15.0x | (72.0x) | 293.2x | |||
| $3.1B | $1.7B | 8.6x | 8.3x | 15.8x | 14.8x | |||
| $3.4B | $42M | 9.9x | 9.7x | 787.1x | 35.3x | |||
| $2.9B | $245M | 11.5x | 10.8x | 137.4x | 39.5x | |||
| $5.2B | $1.4B | 3.6x | 3.8x | 13.2x | 13.0x | |||
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Common questions about Splunk
| When was Splunk founded? | Splunk was founded in 2003. |
| Where is Splunk headquartered? | Splunk is headquartered in San Francisco, CA, United States. |
| Is Splunk publicly listed? | No, Splunk was acquired by Cisco in September 2023. |
| Who acquired Splunk? | Splunk was acquired by Cisco in September 2023. |
| How much was Splunk acquired for? | Splunk was acquired for $28B in September 2023, a 7.1x revenue multiple. |
| How much funding has Splunk raised? | Splunk has raised $40M across 3 funding rounds. |
| What was Splunk's last funding round? | Splunk's last funding round was a $25M Series C in September 2007, led by Ignition Partners. |
| Who are Splunk's investors? | Splunk's investors include August Capital, Sevin Rosen Funds, JK&B Capital and Ignition Partners. |
| Which companies are comparable to Splunk? | Companies comparable to Splunk include Celonis, Claroty, Octave Intelligence, ReliaQuest, Temporal Technologies and Geovis. |
| How many companies has Splunk acquired? | Splunk has acquired 14 companies, including TwinWave, TruSTAR, Flowmill, Plumbr and Rigor. |
| What was the largest acquisition by Splunk? | The $1.1B acquisition of SignalFx in August 2019 is the largest acquisition Splunk has made to date. |
| How many companies has Splunk invested in? | Splunk has invested in 3 companies, including Fletch, Insight Engines and Acalvio Technologies. |
| What was Splunk's last investment? | In July 2021, Splunk invested in Fletch's $16M Series A alongside Erik Swan, August Capital, Real Ventures and 4 other investors. |
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