Prosus Acquires Stack Overflow Online Technology Community

Prosus has acquired online technology community Stack Overflow for $1.8 billion.

This is technology M&A deal number 321 that ChannelE2E has covered so far in 2021.See all technology M&A deals for 2021 and 2020 listed here.

Stack Overflow’s online community supports more than 100 million people worldwide each month. The Q&A-oriented, well known among developers, contains more than 52 million questions and answers. A new question surfaces roughly every 14 seconds, the site owner says.

More recently, the company has promoted Stack Overflow for Teams — a knowledge management & collaboration solution.

Prosus, meanwhile, promotes workplace learning. The company expects to reach 90% of the Fortune 100 across its corporate learning companies — including Stack Overflow, Skillsoft, Udemy and Codecademy.

Prosus Acquires Stack Overflow: Executive Perspectives

In a prepared statement about the deal, Larry Illg, CEO of EdTech at Prosus, said:

“We are delighted to be welcoming Stack Overflow to the Prosus family as we increasingly focus on the future of workplace learning. Learning of any kind typically begins with a question and their platform is critically important for global developers when they have questions about their work. There is an opportunity to connect more deeply with their community through our other education platforms to further fulfill their learning needs.

“With enduring skills shortages and ever-evolving needs within technology organizations, technology training has emerged as the largest and fastest growing segment of corporate learning and development. As an operator of businesses across 90+ countries, we understand the needs of technologists and developers, particularly in high-growth markets. In addition to further scaling its community in the markets we know well, we want to help Stack Overflow Teams to expand within enterprises to address an underserved opportunity to transform their technology learning and collaboration.”

Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar added:

 “We are excited to be joining the Prosus family, which catapults us into a new phase of growth and allows us to expand and accelerate Stack Overflow’s impact around the world. Prosus’s expertise growing and nurturing communities, especially in a global context, will make our public platform even more invaluable in helping developers and technologists learn and grow. Given Prosus’s focus on the future of the workplace, their partnership will allow our market leading SaaS collaboration product, Stack Overflow for Teams, to reach thousands more global enterprises, allowing them to accelerate product innovation and increase productivity by unlocking institutional knowledge.”

The deal is expected to close sometime in Q3 2021.