Channel Brief: EQT Buys Majority Stake in Acronis, Fortinet Acquires Next DLP, Rewst Raises $45M

Good morning, folks!

A couple big investment/acquisition news items this morning; global investment organization EQT is buying a majority stake in MSP platform Acronis, Rewst raises $45 million and Fortinet acquires Next DLP.

Critical Start this week launched its free Cyber Range risk and response training platform and Eric Cheng has been named VP of MSP and SI partnerships at NaaS solutions firm Console Connect. Congratulations!

As always, drop me a line at [email protected] if you have news to share or want to say hi!

Grab your coffee. Here's what you need to know today.

Today’s Tech, Channel and MSP News

1. EQT Acquires Majority Stake in Acronis: European private equity firm EQT, through its EQT X fund, will acquire a majority stake in Acronis, the companies said in a statement. The founders, management, and existing investors – including funds and accounts managed by CVC, Springcoast and BlackRock Private Equity Partners – will remain as significant minority shareholders. In 2022, Acronis was valued at about $3.5 billion. Founded in 2003, Acronis is a leading cybersecurity, data protection and IT solutions vendor for MSPs, and the investment by EQT will enable the company to continue scaling its network rapidly. With 15 offices around the globe and more than 1,700 employees, Acronis’ network spans over 150 countries enabling over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses, Acronis said.

2. Rewst Raises $45 Million to Expand Platform, Invest in Education:  MSP automation platform Rewst announced a $45 million capital raise led by Sapphire Ventures, with existing investors Meritech Capital and OpenView. The round brings the total raised in the last 12 months to $76 million, the company said, which will be used to accelerate the pace of innovation for its market-leading RPA platform and invest in community, education and support for its MSP customers. 

3. Console Connect Names Eric Cheng VP of MSP and SI Partnerships: I'm a bit late noting this executive hire, but network-as-a-service (NaaS) platform Console Connect named Eric Cheng as the company’s new vice president of MSP and system integrator (SI) partnerships. In his new role, Cheng will oversee Console Connect’s reseller program, PartnerConnect, and will work alongside global MSPs, channel partners, resellers and tech services distributor (TSD) partners to identify new opportunities with NaaS. Cheng is an accomplished ICT manager with extensive international experience in sales, product, network and operations management. His background includes bringing new products and services to market, IT management, network planning and engineering, client relationship management, customer service, revenue creation, cost improvement and profit and loss management. Most recently, Cheng served as the regional director for APAC at SASE provider Cato Networks, and previously held sales and product management positions at Superloop and Telstra. Congratulations!

4. Critical Start Opens Free Cyber Range: Managed detection and response (MDR) solutions provider Critical Start launched Critical Start Cyber Range this week -- a cyber operations risk and response (CORR) platform that the company said will revolutionize cybersecurity training, testing and evaluation in a safe, controlled environment. The free Critical Start Cyber Range capability is not a demo environment, but rather a virtual environment that simulates real-world cyber threats and scenarios. These are curated from thousands of real-world attacks identified and stopped by the Critical Start MDR security operations team. This capability allows organizations to train their cybersecurity teams on the MDR service user interface, test new security products as organization migrate to new cybersecurity vendors, and evaluate their overall cyber readiness without risking their actual infrastructure.

5. Fortinet Acquires Next DLP: Network security solutions firm Fortinet has acquired Next DLP, an insider risk and data protection company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. With this acquisition, Fortinet will improve its position in the standalone enterprise data loss prevention (DLP) market and strengthen its leadership in integrated DLP markets within endpoint and SASE in alignment with Fortinet’s business strategy, the company said in a statement. Fortinet plans to integrate Next DLP’s technology to add advanced data loss prevention capabilities to Fortinet’s security service edge (SSE) offering, as well as integrate additional insider risk and data protection capabilities across the Fortinet Security Fabric.

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