Silver Lake is reportedly looking into an acquisition of Workday in a blockbuster tech take-private deal. If the deal passes muster with all parties involved, it would become one of the largest private-equity-led take-private buyouts in the history of the enterprise software space.
Workday Inc. (NASDAQ: WDAY) shares have been especially volatile this week following rumors of confidential negotiations to be acquired by private-equity giant Silver Lake. Stock trading has been halted multiple times during trading on Thursday the 13 th , where the share price surged 18% to close at $206.45, adding nearly $8bn to the software company’s market cap between the time the rumors first dropped and the close. From a rough $43bn valuation this morning to over $51bn market cap this afternoon.
Highlights of deal:
* Pre-News Valuation: ~$43B
* Post-News Valuation: ~$51B
* Single-Day Gain: ~18%
* 2026 YTD: Down ~15% before news broke; down over 40% relative to its 2024 high
Private Equity is Still Investing Big in Enterprise Cloud
Founded by former PeopleSoft executives Aneel Bhusri and David Duffield in 2005 Workday provides cloud-based human capital management (HCM), payroll and financial software to over 11,500 global customers, including such industry titans as Netflix and Thomson Reuters, both Fortune 500 companies.
Despite the market’s general caution in terms of investor sentiment toward enterprise software companies facing investor concerns surrounding the threat of generative AI to existing SaaS revenues, interest from private equity reflects deep value tech investors likely believe there is immense upside opportunity in enterprise platforms with copious amounts of proprietary customer data and globally entrenched distribution.
Silver Lake could syndicate equity financing through co-investment with the likes of other private equity houses or sovereign wealth funds.
Neither Silver Lake nor Workday will comment on the reported interest, but people with knowledge of the situation have stated that Silver Lake could syndicate the equity financing through partnerships with co-investment funds or sovereign wealth funds in order to facilitate such a multi-billion dollar acquisition transaction – not unlike Silver Lake’s other mega-deals in the tech sector to date. The discussions are reportedly in the preliminary stages and can thus still fall apart, as the discussions haven’t progressed enough to be formally binding yet.
