Acquisition follows PDFTron’s recent major purchase of PDF solutions leader, Belgium’s iText; extends PDFTron’s broad, international platform with additional, enterprise-ready features
VANCOUVER, BC—PDFTron Systems Inc., the world’s leading provider of digital content solutions for software developers has acquired PDFlib GmbH, a München, Germany-based innovator of dynamic, server-side PDF creation technology. Incepted in 1997, PDFlib’s primary PDF product family has proven itself in thousands of deployments and development environments worldwide, including those of globally recognized brands in the financial services, manufacturing, and enterprise cloud computing industries.
With its acquisition of PDFlib, PDFTron marks its second European action in three months following its purchase of the leading open-source PDF technology company iText in April 2022.
The addition of PDFlib’s mature toolkit for PDF processing further positions PDFTron as the foremost international technology platform provider for developers and end-users of document processing solutions. PDFlib’s specialization in enterprise PDF features, including its support for multilingual texts, is highly complementary to PDFTron’s technology platform. The addition of PDFlib’s robust and secure offering will enrich PDFTron’s existing document creation APIs. In addition, PDFlib’s highly experienced developer team will assist in further accelerating PDFTron’s product R&D in complementary areas of document manipulation, document workflow automation, and intelligent document processing.
Thoma Bravo, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, made a strategic growth investment in PDFTron in May 2021, helping fuel PDFTron’s recent acquisitions.
"We are thrilled to join forces with PDFTron’s international teams and together, continue to deliver top-performing document solutions to the enterprise market," said Thomas Merz, managing director and founder of PDFlib. "By combining our offerings and expertise, developers and their organizations stand to benefit from the broadest possible portfolio of industry-leading solutions. As part of our combined efforts with PDFTron, the PDFlib team will continue to develop cutting-edge server products that offer rich PDF functionality compatible with a wide variety of development tools and on the broadest spectrum of computing platforms."
“PDFlib’s long track record of innovating its unique, server-side solutions nearly matches our own deep history in pioneering document SDK features,” stated PDFTron CEO Cassidy Smirnow. “The acquisition of PDFlib is yet another key example of how we’re creating unparalleled value for customers through partnership. The partnership with PDFlib strengthens our ability to give developers the most secure and feature-rich foundation on which to realize their roadmaps and build solutions that deliver outstanding productivity, automation, and experiences across all major platforms and digital content formats.”
PDFTron was advised on the transaction by KPMG US, Hengeler Mueller, Choate Hall & Stewart and Crosslake Technologies. Thomas Merz was advised by the Munich-based firm Peters, Schönberger & Partner.
PDFTron is a premier global provider of high-performance document processing technology serving OEM and enterprise customers across a broad spectrum of industries. PDFTron’s market-leading SDK drives digital transformation and powers next generation software applications with dynamic document viewing, annotation, processing, and conversion capabilities, as well as advanced features such as document understanding, data extraction, and redaction. PDFTron technology supports all major platforms and dozens of unique file types, including support for PDF, MS Office, and CAD formats. For more information, visit www.pdftron.com
About PDFlib
Founded in 1999, PDFlib GmbH is completely focused on PDF technology. Customers have used its products since 1997, with PDFlib being the first developer library to enable on-the-fly PDF creation. In 2006, PDFlib was one of the founding members of the PDF Association (formerly PDF/A Competence Center). The company closely follows development and market trends such as ISO standards for PDF. PDFlib GmbH products are distributed all over the world with major markets in Europe, North America and Japan. For more information, visit www.pdflib.com.
Read the release on the PR Newswire website here.