Qualtrics

[TheWorldNewsOrg]

Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey's larger, faster-growing, and more profitablecousin, was all set for its IPO this week...until a little no-name firm called SAP (that's sarcasm) came along and said, "Forget that—we'll just buy you for $8 billion."

And it's one for the record books...

• This would be SAP's second-biggest purchase ever, just behind its $8.3 billion acquisition of travel and expense management firm Concur in 2014.
• It would also be the biggest-ever acquisition of a VC-backed enterprise software company, per Axios.

If you're having déjà vu, that's because there's been a couple of these last-minute deals recently:

• Cisco scooped up AppDynamics right before it went public in 2017.
• Over the summer, Workday bought Adaptive Insights at the last hour.

A new billionaire family: Scoring an invite to the Smith family's Thanksgiving meal just got a lot more competitive. CEO Ryan Smith founded Qualtrics with father Scott and brother Jared, and together they owned 45.5% of the company before the deal.