News

Target Partners portfolio company Instana to be acquired by IBM

Munich, Germany – November 18, 2020 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Instana, an application performance monitoring and observability company. With this acquisition IBM further advances its Hybrid Cloud and AI strategy and strengthens its AI-powered automation capabilities.

Tech venture capital firm Target Partners, a leading German tech venture capital firm, first invested in Instana in 2016 and since then has accompanied and supported the company through its impressive growth. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.

As Instana’s first institutional investor, we backed Mirko Novakovic, CEO, and his co-founders Pete Abrams, Pavlo Baron and Fabian Lange when their product was still in beta stage. We are grateful for our partnership with them and proud to have been part of Instana’s global expansion and amazing growth story.” said Berthold von Freyberg, Partner at Target Partners.

Headquartered in Chicago, with a development center in Germany, Instana provides businesses with capabilities to manage the performance of complex and modern cloud-native applications no matter where they reside – on mobile devices, public and private clouds and on-premise. Instana’s enterprise observability platform automatically builds a deep contextual understanding of cloud applications and provides actionable insights to indicate how to best prevent and remedy IT issues that could damage the business or reduce customer satisfaction.

Instana’s observability capabilities combined with IBM’s AI-powered automation capabilities across hybrid cloud environments will give clients a full view of their application performance to best optimize operations.” said Mirko Novakovic. “Berthold and the Target Partners Team embarked on this journey with us from day one. They’ve been a formidable and insightful partner all along. The collaboration on a personal and business level combined with Target Partners’ entrepreneurial experience and technology expertise were integral to our success.

Together with co-investors Accel and Meritech, we believe that the acquisition by IBM is a perfect match and a great outcome also for Instana’s customers.” added Berthold von Freyberg.

About Target Partners

With €330 million under management, Target Partners is one of the leading early-stage venture capital firms in Germany. Target Partners invests in new start-up and early-stage companies and supports them with venture capital during their build-out and expansion phases. With many years of experience as managers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, the team at Target Partners supports entrepreneurs in developing and marketing products and services, building organizations, raising money and taking companies public in Europe and the United States. See also: targetpartners.de and twitter.com/targetpartners.

About Instana

Instana’s Enterprise Observability Platform, powered by automated Application Performance Monitoring, discovers and maps all services, infrastructure and their inter-dependencies automatically. Instana ingests all observability metrics, traces each request, profiles every process and updates application dependency maps in real time to deliver the context and actionable feedback needed by Dev+Ops to optimize application performance, enable innovation and mitigate risk to help them add value and efficiency to the pipeline. Learn more about Instana’s automated application performance management solution at https://instana.com/application-management.

For further information, please refer to IBM's announcement: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2020-11-18-IBM-to-Acquire-Instana-as-Company-Continues-to-Advance-its-Hybrid-Cloud-and-AI-Strategy

Press Contact for Target Partners Miriam Graf miriam@monocerospr.com

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