Just days before its planned initial public offering, corporate performance management software vendor Adaptive Insights Inc. has agreed to be bought by Workday Inc., a maker of financial and human resources cloud applications.

Workday will acquire all of the outstanding shares of Adaptive Insights for $1.55 billion, including about $150 million in unvested equity issued to Adaptive Insights employees.

The deal comes just three weeks after Adaptive Insights filed for an IPO with the goal of raising up to $117.3 million. That makes the purchase price more than twice the company’s estimated $672 million valuation. Corporate performance management is a hot new business process-focused discipline that enables organizations to consolidate forecasts, operational plans and results centrally to gain better insights on the business.

Workday said it intends to combine the Adaptive Insights Business Planning Cloud with its core applications “to enable customers to better plan, execute, and analyze across the organization from a single cloud platform,” according to a prepared statement.

Adaptive Insights, which raised more than $176 million in funding, claims to have more than 3,800 customers, including some of the world’s largest software vendors. It recently branched out from its base in corporate financial management to business and sales planning.

The company had sales of $106.5 million and a $42.6 million loss in its most recent fiscal year, according to its S-1 filing. Its accumulated net losses total $288 million. Although its 2018 loss improved from $58 million in 2016, progress toward profitability has been slow.

“We will need to increase our revenues in future periods in order to become profitable, and, even if we do, we may not be able to maintain or further increase our level of profitability,” Adaptive Insights wrote in the “risk factors” section of its S-1.

The all-cash transaction is expected to close in the third quarter of Workday’s fiscal year 2019, which ends on October 31. Workday has a market capitalization of $27 billion.

The company has been on a minor acquisition spree lately, acquiring Rallyteam Inc. in a deal announced last week and SkipFlag Inc. early this year. Both deals were aimed at boosting Workday’s machine learning capabilities.

“Together, Workday and Adaptive Insights will equip customers to better plan, execute, and analyze all in one system,” said Workday Chief Product Officer Petros Dermetzis in a blog post published this morning.  Workday expects all existing Adaptive Insights employees to join the company and Chief Executive Tom Bogan to stay on as head of the business unit.

For its part, Adaptive Insights expects to be able to piggyback on Workday’s global reach to grow its customer base.

“We can bring our solutions to global markets through a larger brand, an expanded sales force and as part of a more expansive complement of product offerings,” Chairman Rob Hull wrote in a blog post.  “We also gain an expanded partner network… and bring our Business Planning Cloud to new geographies and industries.”

Workday was founded in 2005 by two former PeopleSoft Inc. executives following Oracle Corp.’s hostile takeover of that company. The company reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $618.6 million, up 29 percent year-over-year. It stock had risen risen 35 percent this year before falling in the wake of its most recent earnings report. However, shares are still up 20 percent in 2018.

Image: Workday