Progress Software has closed its purchase of Domo’s business. Progress (Nasdaq: PRGS) now owns Domo’s AI and data platform, its employees and substantially all of its assets, and takes on some liabilities. The price agreed in July was $400 million in cash.
What Progress didn’t buy is the interesting part. The listed company stays public, renamed Huckleberry.ai, and starts trading on the Nasdaq Global Market as HUCK on September 24. It walks away with about $221 million in cash, roughly $4.46 a share, and no debt. The credit facility is repaid and the warrants bought back. It also keeps more than $900 million in net operating loss carryforwards.
Why an asset sale
The structure explains itself. A straight merger would have handed Domo’s shareholders a price and wiped out the tax losses. Selling the operating assets instead keeps the NOLs inside the listed shell, where they can shelter future profits from tax. Domo put a tax benefits preservation plan in place to protect them.
Founder Josh James, who also founded Omniture before selling it to Adobe, stays on as CEO of Huckleberry. He held control of Domo and approved the sale by written consent, so no shareholder vote was needed. His line on the close: the Huckleberry business starts with significant resources and leaders who know how to build.
What Progress gets
Progress has built itself through acquisitions like Chef, MarkLogic and ShareFile, buying mature software and running it for cash. Domo fits the pattern. CEO Yogesh Gupta described it as data integration, governed analytics, automation and AI data products in one platform, which he says strengthens Progress’s pitch around giving companies context and control for their AI projects.
The Domo arc
Domo went public in 2018 at $21 a share. It ended as a $400 million asset sale and a cash shell. The BI market consolidated around Microsoft Power BI, Tableau and a few others, and a standalone dashboard vendor never found its footing at scale.
Huckleberry’s board says it’s weighing how to deploy the cash and tax assets, and possibly return some capital to shareholders. The shell with the tax losses is now worth watching more than the software ever was.