Buyout firm TPG Capital today said it will acquire the government business of cybersecurity company Forcepoint LLC for $2.45 billion, a figure higher than what the entirety of Forcepoint was acquired for by Francisco Partners in 2021.

TPG is buying a unit of Forcepoint known as “G2CI,” which caters to government and critical infrastructure customers. G2CI primarily serves U.S. government and federal agencies and commercial customers who transact directly with the government. Post-acquisition, Francisco Partners will retain a minority stake in Forcepoint G2CI while continuing to manage the firm’s commercial cybersecurity business as a separate entity.

Francisco Partners acquired Forcepoint from Raytheon Technologies in 2021 for $1.1 billion, making the sale of the government business a very nice earner for the private equity company.

TPG is a voracious private equity company with a long track record in the cybersecurity sector, with early investments in Zscaler Inc., which went public in 2018, and Tanium Inc. In 2016, TPG acquired a majority stake in Intel Corp.’s McAfee, and in 2021, it secured majority stakes in identity-management firms Thycotic Software Ltd. and Centrify, merging them to form Delinea Inc.

The deal to acquire Forcepoint’s government business isn’t the first time that Francisco Partners and TPG have collaborated on deals. The two private investment firms jointly acquired the integration platform-as-a-service company Boomi from Dell Technologies Inc. for $4 billion in 2021.

“Today’s operating environment – one in which data volumes are compounding, attack surfaces are broadening and threats are growing in sophistication – demands dynamic security solutions,” TPG Partner Tim Millikin said in a statement. “This is especially true for the public sector and Forcepoint has designed its platform to address the unique complexities of government objectives and culture.”

The acquisition is subject to regulatory review and other customary closing conditions, with an expected closing date in the fourth quarter of 2023.

In 2019, Ravi Srinivasan, then vice president of solutions and platform marketing at Forcepoint, spoke with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media Inc.’s live stream studio, during the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. In the interview, he discussed how Forcepoint takes a human-centric view of security to protect enterprise users and data.

Image: Forcepoint