Medallia, a customer and employee experience solutions provider, has entered into a recapitalization agreement with its lenders that will strengthen its financial foundation for long-term growth, reducing its outstanding debt and providing $150 million of new capital. Upon completion of the transaction, Medallia will change ownership from Thoma Bravo to an investor group led by Blackstone, Apollo, and FS KKR Capital.
Medallia was founded in 2001 and went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2019 before being taken private in 2021. Eighteen months ago, a new executive team joined to reinvent the business for an AI-first market, modernizing operations, and sharpening strategic focus while maintaining strong profitability. It was acquired by software investment firm Thoma Bravo in July 2021 for $6.4 billion.
Thoma Bravo never really did anything with Medallia, and its positioning within the company was placed in doubt last year when Thoma Bravo acquired Verint in August 2025 for $2 billion. Thoma Bravo also acquired Calabrio in 2021, and after the Verint deal, combined Calabrio and Verint into one business unit operating under the Verint name. Medallia was largely left out in the cold aftere those moves.
Medallia expects that to change under the current plans, advancing its existing $500 million commitment to innovation over the next few years and providingthe capital to accelerate it, moving the company beyond traditional experience management into a more intelligent, predictive, and automated platform.
"Today's announcement marks a significant milestone towards the next generation of AI-led enterprise experience management," said Mark Bishof, CEO of Medallia, in a statement. "The transformation of Medallia has been well underway; what changes today is the pace. With a strengthened balance sheet and $150 million in new capital, we are accelerating our commitment to invest over $500 million in products and services for our customers over the next few years."
"Medallia is a profitable business with a strong track record serving many of the largest companies in the world," said Brad Marshall, global head of private credit strategies at Blackstone, in a statement. "We're confident in the business under this new capital structure and look forward to supporting its plans to invest in this next phase of innovation and growth."
Medallia plans to expand its generative AI and automation capabilities across its platform, enabling organizations to more quickly identify emerging patterns, predict business impact, and orchestrate intelligent actions at enterprise scale. Building on its Frontline-Ready AI foundation, Medallia also plans to further evolve its platform with deeper integrations across contact center, CRM, workflow, and emerging agentic AI ecosystems.