Informatica went public, was bought out, went public again, and was then sold to Salesforce. The first IPO came in April 1999. Back then the Palo Alto company sold software for data warehouses: tools that pulled numbers out of sales, finance and supply systems, cleaned them up and loaded them into one place for analysis. Every big company was building a warehouse, and most were writing that plumbing by hand. Informatica offered to sell it off the shelf.

Dhillon and Nesamoney

Informatica was incorporated in California in February 1993. Gaurav Dhillon was CEO and Diaz Nesamoney was president when it filed. The two built the company around what the industry calls ETL: extract, transform and load. A retailer could pull orders from one database and customers from another, match them, and load the result into a warehouse on a schedule. The bet was that data integration would grow into its own market, separate from the databases themselves.

Three Lives on Wall Street

Informatica priced at $16 a share in April 1999 and listed on Nasdaq as INFA. It survived the dot-com crash and grew into a large data management company. In 2015, Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board took it private for $48.75 a share in cash. Informatica returned to the public market in October 2021 on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2025, Salesforce bought it for about $8 billion.

Cover: Bodleian Library, William Henry Fox Talbot. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for shelves of a great library (organized data).