Cisco buys technology that fills a gap in one of its product lines. Our records hold 65 software acquisitions announced from 2015 to 2025, third among product-driven buyers in our ranking of strategic buyers of software companies. For that technology it pays a high multiple of revenue, a median of 22.2x on the eight deals we can price, more than six times the 3.4x private software median. The payment is cash, and it comes in steps, because a large part of what Cisco spends goes to the people who stay. Its retention terms carry as much weight as the price.
The San Jose networking group, with revenue of $63.3bn in its 2026 fiscal year, booked $50.5bn of purchase consideration across its 2015 to 2025 fiscal years, most of it in a handful of large deals. The typical deal is small and shows up in its filings only as part of a total.
Cisco’s annual reports on Form 10-K give the spend, retention costs and deal terms. We built the deal list from Mergermarket and Cisco’s releases and filings, and the 65 software acquisitions are the basis for every count; the chipmakers, hardware makers and IT services firms it also bought appear separately under What Cisco Buys.
Cisco Subsidiaries and Brands: How Cisco Is Organized
Cisco reports product revenue in four lines plus services, and the companies it buys end up inside one of them.
| Product line | Revenue, fiscal 2026 | What it covers | Brands from acquisitions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Networking | $34.7bn | Switching, routing, wireless, servers, optics | Meraki, Acacia Optics, Isovalent |
| Security | $8.2bn | Network security, identity and access, SASE, identity and agentic security | Duo, Splunk security operations |
| Collaboration | $4.3bn | Webex Suite, devices, contact center, communications APIs | Webex, with Slido built in |
| Observability | $1.1bn | Splunk combined with AppDynamics, network assurance | Splunk, AppDynamics, ThousandEyes |
| Services | $15.0bn | Support and advisory services |
Cisco states its reason for buying plainly in its 10-K: “We acquire companies in order to gain access to talent, technology, products and features, operational capabilities or new markets.” Its corporate development team describes acquired companies as bringing “great talent and technology, mature products, or new business models.” In 2017 Cisco set out five routes to growth: build, buy, partner, invest and co-develop. It chooses to buy when an acquisition offers “a capability, acceleration potential or earlier market entry compared to partnering or developing in-house.”
The invest route feeds the buy route. Cisco Investments, the venture arm, took part in 135 funding rounds and minority stakes from 2015 to 2025, and five of the 65 acquisitions were companies a Cisco entity had backed first, one to six years before buying them.
How Many Companies Cisco Acquires
Cisco made 33 software acquisitions in 2015 to 2019, 15 in 2020 to 2022 and 17 in 2023 to 2025, about six a year across the eleven years. The busiest year was 2023, with 11, the year Cisco agreed to buy Splunk, its largest deal, followed by 2015 with 10 and 2017 with nine. The low point was 2022, with one. The pace then slowed to three in 2024 and three in 2025, and in the first half of 2026 Cisco announced further acquisitions in AI observability and identity security.
How Much Cisco Spends on Acquisitions
Cisco’s filings give the total purchase consideration for every fiscal year. From fiscal 2015 to 2025 it came to $50.5bn. The years fall into three groups. From fiscal 2016 to 2019 Cisco spent between $2.7bn and $3.6bn a year, each year carried by one deal above $1bn. Fiscal 2021 reached $7.5bn, the year the optical chipmaker Acacia closed, and fiscal 2024 reached $28.5bn, the year of Splunk. In the quiet years, fiscal 2015, 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2025, the total ran between $293M and $364M.
Those quiet years are the better guide to Cisco’s routine buying. Fiscal 2026, outside the window of this page, brought $550M, the highest total since 2015 for a fiscal year with every deal below $1bn.
Cisco funds acquisitions from cash. Free cash flow was $12.8bn in fiscal 2026 and $13.3bn in fiscal 2025, and Cisco targets returning at least half of it to shareholders. Cash paid for acquisitions, net of cash acquired, was $516M in fiscal 2026, about 4 percent of that year’s free cash flow. Money is the smallest constraint on a deal with Cisco; strategic fit is the deciding one.
What Size of Company Cisco Buys
A price is on record for 22 of the 65 acquisitions, 34 percent. Across those 22 the median value is $531M, with an interquartile range of $178M to $931M, and six were valued at $1bn or more. Disclosure has fallen over time: 15 of the 33 deals of 2015 to 2019 carry a price, against three of the 17 deals of 2023 to 2025.
Cisco’s filings show the small end. The acquisitions it reported only as part of a total in fiscal 2015 to 2023, leaving out fiscal 2021, cost $1.5bn together, an average of about $43M. Of the 56 acquisitions with a recorded closing date, 15 were announced on the day they closed, the pattern of a small purchase made public once it is done.
Revenue figures are scarcer: the five privately held companies we can price against revenue had revenue between $6M and $151M. Across that range, what the companies have in common is a technology Cisco wanted inside one of its product lines.
What Cisco Buys
Grouped by the Cisco product line each target joined, the 65 software acquisitions split as follows, with Cisco’s other acquisitions in the last row:
| Theme | Acquisitions | Of which 2023 to 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Networking, cloud infrastructure and IoT software | 18 | 5 |
| Security | 17 | 8 |
| Collaboration and customer experience | 17 | 1 |
| Observability and data | 11 | 2 |
| Other | 2 | 1 |
| Beyond software: IT services, chips and hardware | 11 | 2 |
Networking software leads by one deal, with 18, and security took eight of the 17 acquisitions of 2023 to 2025: cloud security, identity threat detection, vulnerability management, asset intelligence and AI model security. Collaboration was the busiest theme of 2015 to 2022, with 16 deals against nine in security, as Cisco built out Webex and its contact center business, and has since slowed to one.
In 2024 and 2025, half of the six acquisitions sell AI as the product: model security, a platform for small language models and real-time speech translation for Webex.
At least 12 of the 65 acquisitions, about one in five, were bought as features for a product Cisco already sells, by Cisco’s own description of each deal: additions to Webex, AppDynamics, ThousandEyes, Splunk, the Meraki cameras and the Crosswork automation suite. For a founder, the first question in a Cisco conversation is which product team wants your technology.
Beyond its 65 software acquisitions, our records show 11 more from 2015 to 2025: five IT services firms and six other businesses, three of them chipmakers and three hardware makers. The largest was Acacia, the optical chipmaker that closed in fiscal 2021. These deals sit outside the software counts, charts and multiples on this page.
Where Cisco Buys
Cisco bought in 12 countries. The United States leads with 45 acquisitions, 69 percent, followed by Israel and the United Kingdom with four each, Canada, Germany and India with two each, and one each in the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Norway, Slovakia and Sweden.
Outside the United States, Israel’s four deals were cloud security, network automation and application tracing; the European deals include collaboration and customer messaging software in the United Kingdom and Slovakia, network automation and broadband measurement in the United Kingdom, a cloud mobile core in Norway, camera analytics in Sweden, product analytics in the Czech Republic, industrial security in France and cloud-native tools in Hungary. Since 2023, six of Cisco’s 17 acquisitions were outside the United States.
What Cisco Pays: Acquisition Multiples
Published prices are scarce, so we gathered every deal we could match to the target’s revenue: deals in our database with a reported multiple, listed targets’ own filings, and company registries. That gives eight acquisitions with an EV/Revenue multiple, at a median of 22.2x. For private software as a whole, our valuation research puts the median at 3.4x across 1,028 deals.
By type, the five privately held companies sold at between 20.0x and 26.0x revenue, and the three takeovers of listed companies at single-digit multiples. By size, the four deals above $1bn ranged from 5.0x to 24.6x.
The disclosed prices skew large, and we would read the 22.2x with that in mind. Seven of the eight are priced at $610M or more, and the median priced deal is $531M, against an average of about $43M for the acquisitions Cisco reports only as part of a total. The 22.2x describes Cisco’s larger purchases of privately held and listed companies. The 43 acquisitions with an undisclosed price carry their prices inside the filings’ totals.
EBITDA multiples carry little meaning here: three of the eight priced deals report a positive EBITDA, too few for a median. As arithmetic, 22.2x revenue equals 74x EBITDA at a 30 percent margin, and to land at the 13.6x EBITDA median for private software deals a target would need a margin above 100 percent. Cisco prices strategic fit and growth, and current profit plays a small part.
The headline price is also only part of what Cisco spends. In fiscal 2025 it recognized $876M of compensation tied to the continued employment of staff from acquired companies, against $293M of purchase consideration that year. Where that money lands depends on the negotiation.
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How Cisco Structures a Deal
Cisco pays in cash. Its filings describe the consideration for its acquisitions as cash and vested share-based awards assumed, and since fiscal 2023 as primarily cash. Equity held by employees moves across: when Cisco bought Splunk, it converted Splunk’s equity awards into Cisco awards, and $137M of their value, the part earned before the deal, counted as purchase consideration.
The second part of the deal is retention. Cisco’s 10-K says: “we have agreed to pay certain additional amounts contingent upon the continued employment with Cisco of certain employees of the acquired entities.” The expense ran at $271M in fiscal 2022, $222M in fiscal 2023, $618M in fiscal 2024, $876M in fiscal 2025 and $360M in fiscal 2026, with up to $293M more to come as of July 2026. In fiscal 2023 Cisco paid $315M of purchase consideration and recognized $222M of this compensation in the same year.
For an owner, that structure decides who gets paid. The purchase price goes to shareholders, in the order set by any investor preferences; the retention pool goes to the founders and staff who join Cisco and stay. In a venture-backed company those can be different people, and the balance between the two is a term to negotiate as hard as the price.
Cisco moves quickly. Of the 56 acquisitions with a recorded closing date, 15 were announced at closing, and the other 41 closed a median of 46 days after announcement. The longest, the Splunk takeover, took 179 days from announcement to closing. Cisco’s own risk factors name integrating the IT security, systems and personnel of acquired companies as a risk, so prepare your security documentation and your key-employee plan before the first meeting.
Cisco also buys companies it knows from the inside. Five of its acquisitions followed an earlier investment by a Cisco entity, and a venture round with Cisco Investments on the cap table gives Cisco a view of the business well before any offer.
What Happens After Closing
Cisco integrates. Acquired companies become products or features inside its four lines, and the acquired brands that remain lead a product line: Splunk, combined with AppDynamics, is the base of Cisco’s observability business and its security operations, and ThousandEyes is its network assurance product. The companies Cisco agreed to buy in 2026 are set to join the Splunk platform.
People stay at a high rate, by Cisco’s own measure. In 2017 Cisco said about 80 percent of acquired team members were still at Cisco three years after joining, that 87 percent of the key employees of an acquired company, usually founders and critical leaders, stayed at least two years, and that acquired talent made up 20 percent of its employees and of its leadership. The retention compensation in its filings is the financial side of that record.
Cisco reshapes its organization around new priorities. In September 2026 it announced a restructuring to shift resources toward “advanced AI, security, and quantum networking technologies,” and its 10-K says plainly that “prior acquisitions have produced mixed results, ranging from successful new products and technologies to failures to achieve expected benefits.” Meraki shows the upside: it had under $100M of annual bookings when Cisco bought it and well over $1bn within five years, by Cisco’s account. Ask the Cisco team which product line your technology joins, who sponsors it, and how that line’s targets for the next two years look.
Who Else Buys What Cisco Buys
Cisco ranks third among product-driven strategic buyers of software companies in our ranking, with 65 software acquisitions from 2015 to 2025, behind Microsoft and Alphabet. It kept buying through the AI cycle: 17 of those acquisitions, about a quarter of the total, came in 2023 to 2025.
In our view Cisco is the natural buyer for security, observability and network software that its sales force can sell to the enterprises and service providers it already serves. The same companies attract other platform buyers and private equity.
Is This a Good Time to Sell to Cisco?
Cisco is buying, and its focus is clear. In the first half of 2026 it announced acquisitions in AI observability and identity security, all to join the Splunk platform. Revenue rose 12 percent to $63.3bn in fiscal 2026, free cash flow was $12.8bn, and the September 2026 restructuring moved resources toward AI, security and quantum networking. Purchase consideration of $550M in fiscal 2026 was the highest since 2015 for a fiscal year with every deal below $1bn.
The wider software market repriced in early 2026, as our March 2026 webinar on SaaS valuations described, and buyers now ask how a business is addressing AI disruption risk. Cisco’s recent targets answer that question by selling AI themselves or securing it.
If your product sits in identity, security operations, AI observability or network assurance, Cisco’s demand is current, and the price for a scarce capability rises with the number of buyers competing for it. The latest prices for the wider market are in our software valuation multiples research.
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