Citrix to acquire Wrike from Vista for $2.25 billion

Wrike is a SaaS-based collaborative work management platform. It has grown in popularity as businesses are shifting to remote working solutions.

Work collaboration software such as Wrike’s has grown in popularity as businesses have increasingly relied on remote work since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

Citrix on late Tuesday announced it will acquire Wrike from Vista Equity Partners for $2.25 billion. Wrike is a popular SaaS-based collaborative work management platform. The acquisition is likely to help Citrix beef up its digital work platform offerings.

Wrike, San Jose-headquartered, caters to approximately 18,000 customers globally. Its top offerings are aimed at helping companies better manage and complete work at scale. Wrike was founded by Andrew Filev in 2006. It is also backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.

Wrike is expected to have approximately 30% stand-alone growth to between $180 million and $190 million in unaudited SaaS annualised recurring revenue (ARR1) in 2021, with the opportunity to accelerate growth over time under Citrix's ownership, according to the official press release.

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC is serving as financial advisor to Citrix on the transaction and Shearman & Sterling LLP as legal counsel. The financial advisor to Wrike is Goldman Sachs Group & Co. LLC, and legal counsel is Kirkland & Ellis LLP.

“Together, Citrix and Wrike will deliver the solutions needed to power a cloud- delivered digital workspace experience that enables teams to securely access the resources and tools they need to collaborate and get work done in the most efficient and effective way possible across any channel, device or location,” David Henshall, president and CEO.

The acquisition comes at a time when companies around the world are making efforts to build a robust work-from-home setup for its employees. Wrike, just like other remote working platforms, has grown in popularity since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Wrike's main competitors are Asana Inc., Atlassian Inc.'s Trello Inc. and Slack Technologies Inc, which was recently acquired by Salesforce.