Japanese cybersecurity software company Trend Micro Inc. is reportedly exploring a sale after being approached by several potential buyers.

Referencing people familiar with the matter, Reuters reported that Trend Micro has been working with investment banks to solicit interest from potential buyers, including private equity firms. The same source did note that it’s not certain a deal will happen.

Trend Micro declined to comment on the potential sale. A spokesperson said only that “as a market-leading publicly traded cybersecurity company, we remain focused on business transformation and customer expansion through our industry-leading AI platform.”

Founded in 1988, Trend Micro initially focused on antivirus software for personal computers before expanding its portfolio over the years to broader security products. Based in Tokyo, Trend Micro today offers advanced solutions that protect enterprises and consumers against digital threats. The company’s current focus is on providing comprehensive security across cloud environments, networks and endpoints to help organizations safeguard their digital assets.

Trend Micro’s offerings include artificial intelligence-driven threat detection, cloud security solutions and advanced threat intelligence services. The company’s Cloud One platform delivers security services tailored for cloud-native applications, while its Vision One platform offers extended detection and response capabilities across endpoints, servers and networks.

In June 2023, Trend Micro released Companion, a generative AI assistant that allows security operations center teams to ask threat-hunting questions. Offered as part of the company’s One XDR platform, the service can explain cross-layer event alerts, decode tracker scripts, create breach mitigation recommendations, automate email responses and help-desk ticketing and automate incident reporting.

Coming into any potential acquisition, Trend Micro has a market cap of about 950 billion yen ($6.5 billion).

Potential private equity interest in Trend Micro doesn’t come as a surprise — indeed, the only surprise is that the name Thoma Bravo is not mentioned in the report. Thoma Bravo was behind the largest cybersecurity company acquisition in 2024 so far, that of Darktrace for $5.3 billion in April.

Thoma Bravo also loves buying big cybersecurity companies, so Trend Micro would fit their previous acquisition pattern and the firm has the money to spend. The firm’s model involves buying tech firms, reforming them and sometimes merging them with other acquisitions over a period of years before selling the acquired company for a profit.

A recent example is the sale of cybersecurity software company Venafi Inc. to CyberArk Software Inc. for $1.54 billion in April. Thoma Bravo made $400 million on the deal.

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