Lender threatens to sweep MariaDB accounts over private equity bid

MariaDB has been warned by a bank lender that it may "sweep" its accounts in retaliation for the publication of a private equity bid for the troubled database company. Earlier this week, MariaDB confirmed a possible offer of $37.3 million from private equity company K1 Investment Management to take the recently troubled …

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm confused on how an unsolicited third party takeover offer can cause a lender to say you are in default.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was in violation of a clause of their agreement, or that's what it looks like. Maybe it's to do with the low price offer for the shares bringing the company valuation down significantly?

[Lurko]

It's all very odd this MariaDB business - the whole merger with Angel Pond, the IPO of a company with a spin off of a FOSS asset, dual HQ in Dublin and Redmond, then the culling of business streams, the "spinoff" of its geospatial business and of SkySQL without mention of getting any money for either and a $9m loss in the last three months of 2023. Unclear where money has been invested, who owns what, whether people are losing real money, whether there's any real underlying business.

[Groo The Wanderer]

The history of it reads more like the tale of a tax avoidance scam than anything else. I wouldn't invest a DIME in MariaDB.

[EricM]

IANAL and all, but this having to do with the now corrected value sounds most plausible.

Lending 26M$ to a company expected to be worth 600-something M$ might seem like a relatively low risk.

Lending 26M$ to a company now shown to be worth only 36M$ as per the offer basically means the company is worth 10M$ plus the money you gave them.

I can see why, as a lender, you'd call debt of 2,6 x actual value a "default" ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I make a unsolicited low-ball offer on your house and the mortgage holder sees the loan-to-value ratio go crazy and forces you into default?

[Richard 12]

I assume this is because of the public filing, instead of a private "hah, nope" response to the "offer".

The post below implies the offer is higher than current trading, which would make it serious though

[katrinab]

The offer would surely be fore more than the quoted price on the stock exchange? Otherwise nobody would pay any attention to it.

[doublelayer]

It looks like it is. The current price appears to be about $0.35 per share for a market cap of $24.7M. It seems to have decreased significantly. For example, the highest price in the last year was about ten times that.

[werdsmith]

Maybe it's more about it being publicly announced.

[Jim Mitchell]

They are a public company, I think they have to announce things like this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if the unsolicited offer was prompted by the lender that would be very dodgy.