Informatica went public twice. It first listed in 1999, spent a decade and a half as a public company, and was taken private in 2015 by Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for about $5.3 billion. Six years later it came back with a new pitch. The old business sold licenses for software that moved data between systems. The new Informatica sold the same skills as a cloud subscription, just as companies raced to feed data into analytics and AI.

The Plumbing of Data

Gaurav Dhillon and Diaz Nesamoney founded Informatica in 1993. Big companies kept customer, sales, and supply data in dozens of systems that did not talk to each other. Informatica's tools pulled that data together, cleaned it, and kept it in sync. The work was unglamorous and hard to rip out once installed. Under private ownership the company began moving customers from licenses to cloud subscriptions, with Amit Walia as CEO.

Back on the NYSE, Then Salesforce

Informatica priced its second IPO at $29 a share in October 2021 and listed on the NYSE as INFA. Permira and CPP Investments kept control. The stock spent most of the next years below its offering price. In May 2025 Salesforce agreed to buy Informatica for $25 a share in cash, about $8 billion. The deal closed on November 18, 2025, and Informatica left the NYSE.

Cover: Weaving silk, plate 11 from the series "Silkworm Cultivation", Katsukawa Shunsho. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for weaving silk (threads of data woven together).