Mill Point Capital buys ADC and load balancer Kemp

Kemp Technologies, a provider of load balancers and application delivery controllers, has been bought by Mill Point Capital for an undisclosed amount, the two companies announced on Monday.

Kemp's management team, including CEO Ray Downes, will continue to run the company, and there also will be no personnel or operations changes. Kemp Chairman John Becker retains his position within the company, and will work with Mill Point Capital going forward.

Kemp, which was founded in 2000, currently has more than 200 employees.

Prior to today's acquisition by Mill Point Capital, Kemp had raised $26 million in venture capital funding across three rounds.

Related: F5 Networks nabs virtual ADC vendor NGINX for $670M

Kemp's acquisition came on the heels of F5 Networks buying virtual load balancing vendor NGINX for $670 million last month. While Kemp competes with F5 Networks and other ADC vendors, such as Citrix, its Kemp 360 provides visibility and analytics for multiple ADC products, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), F5 Networks and NGINIX.

The ADC market is interesting," said Lee Doyle, principal analyst, for Doyle Research, in an interview with FierceTelecom. "It's worth several billion dollars. It's being transformed not only by the cloud players running load balancers in AWS or Microsoft Azure, but also increasingly by microservices and container-to-container communications. So, there does seem to be a lot going on. It does seem like there's increased competitive intensity in the market, and people need new funding sources to do that."

According to its website, Kemp has more than 25,000 customers and 60,000 application deployments across 115 countries. Kemp is headquartered in New York, and has regional hubs in Limerick, Ireland; Munich; Singapore; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

"I think Kemp's business model is as innovative as anybody else's," Doyle said. "They have per-application software licensing. The have metered licensing for subscription-based products. They have a couple of interesting products and business models. They are trying to be disruptive, for sure."