Cisco pays big for web performance company ThousandEyes

Cisco Systems agreed to buy ThousandEyes, a San Francisco-based IT performance management platform. No financial terms were disclosed, but Bloomberg put the price tag at around $1 billion.

Why it matters: This is a pandemic-related merger on the upside, with the company accelerating its sale process due to concerns that it could struggle to meet added demand for its services.

ROI: ThousandEyes had raised around $110 million in VC funding, most recently at a $620 million valuation. Shareholders include GV, Thomvest Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Sutter Hill Ventures, and Tenaya Capital.

The bottom line: "ThousandEyes has made a name for itself with its service that watches pretty much the whole internet to help companies figure out the source of performance problems of websites and web-based apps. For instance, it can determine if an outage is the company's fault or that of its service providers." — Julie Bort, Business Insider