Tech investment firm Prosus NV today said it will pay $1.8 billion to acquire Stack Overflow, a hugely popular website for developers that boasts more than 100 million users.

Stack Overflow is operated by Stack Exchange Inc., a venture-backed startup that has raised more than $150 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures. The deal will also see Prosus obtain Stack Overflow for Teams, a cloud-based collaboration service that the startup operates alongside its website.

Prosus is a publicly traded unit of South African internet giant Naspers Ltd. that invests in tech firms. It has a more than $200 billion stake in Chinese technology giant Tencent Holdings Ltd. and partially or fully owns companies across a wide variety of segments ranging from food delivery to payment processing. Prosus says the companies in its portfolios have more than 1.5 billion users across dozens of countries worldwide.

The $1.8 billion the Naspers unit is paying for Stack Overflow is more than 10 times higher than the amount of funding parent Stack Exchange, the startup behind the service, has raised. The steep premium suggests that Naspers expects the deal to create significant revenue opportunities.

Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer site where developers can request peers’ input about programming topics. It generates revenue through an advertising service that enables companies to post job listings and promote their products. 

The startup’s other major revenue driver is its Stack Overflow for Teams collaboration service. The service is a so-called knowledge management hub that enables a company’s employees to share information with another. Developers rely on Stack Overflow for Teams to discuss the technical details of application projects, while the information technology department can use it to share answers to frequently asked support requests.

It’s possible that Stack Overflow for Teams generates more revenue than the ads the startup sells through its question-and-answer website. The service has thousands of corporate customers, including major enterprises such as Microsoft Corp., Box Inc. and Siemens AG.

Prosus previously bought stakes in Ryzac Inc., the operator of the Codecademy coding education platform, and Udemy Inc., which provides a catalog of online training courses that places a particular focus on programming. Prosus sees an opportunity to connect the Stack Exchange “community through our other education platforms to further fulfill their learning needs,” stated Larry Illg, chief executive of the investment group’s education technology business.

The plan may be to promote Codecademy and Udemy education packages to Stack Overflow’s massive user base. Additionally, Prosus hopes to further grow that user base by boosting the site’s popularity in international markets.

The Stack Overflow for Teams service is on the agenda as well. “With enduring skills shortages and ever-evolving needs within technology organizations, technology training has emerged as the largest and fastest growing segment of corporate learning and development,” Illg said. “In addition to further scaling its community in the markets we know well, we want to help Stack Overflow Teams to expand within enterprises to address an underserved opportunity to transform their technology learning and collaboration.”

The transaction is expected to close in the third quarter. Stack Overflow co-founder Joel Spolsky wrote in a blog post that the startup will continue to operate independently after the deal closes with the same team and business practices. 

Image: Stack Overflow