Azul has acquired Worcestershire-based Payara, a global provider of enterprise-grade solutions for Jakarta EE (Java EE) applications and microservices.
The acquisition builds on nearly eight years of collaboration between the two firms.
The announcement follows California-headquartered Azul’s majority investment from Thoma Bravo, alongside renewed minority investments from the company’s existing private equity sponsors, Vitruvian Partners and Lead Edge Capital.
The deal brings together Azul’s Java runtime and platform capabilities with Payara’s strength in application servers for hybrid and cloud-native deployments, targeting challenges such as application modernisation, cloud-native agility and reducing reliance on proprietary stacks like Oracle.
“This strategic acquisition is further testament to Azul’s commitment to support the needs of our global enterprise customer base,” said Scott Sellers, co-founder and CEO of Azul.
“Payara delivers proven products that are naturally synergistic with our existing offerings and brings additional deep technical expertise to the world’s largest independent Java engineering team.
“Together, we will accelerate growth and innovation, expand our roadmap and deliver even greater value to our customers.”
Steve Millidge, founder and CEO at Payara, added: “This is a major new chapter for Payara.
“After a strong and long-standing partnership with Azul, combining forces is the natural next step and positions us for accelerated growth.
“Together, we will strengthen mission-critical solutions for enterprise Java customers and deliver greater performance, security and innovation across the Java ecosystem.”
Adding Payara’s solutions to the company’s Java portfolio expands its offerings in the application server segment and adds an estimated $26 billion total addressable market projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11-14%.