Jul. 10 at 9:18 PM
$OBAI Some weekend speculation while the paint is drying.
My gut feeling is that Kempel will probably sell Bond within the next 3–5 years. He’s already proven he knows when to sell, having successfully exited two previous companies. At 63 years old, he likely doesn’t want to still be running a public micro-cap company when he’s 70. On top of that, he’s already built significant wealth from his prior exits, and the burden of running a listed company with constant regulatory and shareholder pressure becomes less appealing at this stage of life. Add to that how methodically and thoroughly he’s built Bond over the past nine years, and it feels like he’s positioning it for a clean exit rather than planning to run it indefinitely.
Before founding Bond, he built and sold two enterprise technology companies.
In 2003, he co-founded Diligent Technologies with storage veteran Moshe Yanai. The company developed data deduplication technology that helped businesses dramatically cut backup storage costs. It took 5 years before IBM acquired Diligent in 2008 for an estimated
$165–200 million. Kempel stayed on with IBM for about 15 months after the acquisition to help with the integration.
Then in 2009, he founded SimpliVity on his own. The company pioneered hyper-converged infrastructure, combining servers, storage, networking, and data services into a single appliance. SimpliVity raised over
$276 million, reached 🦄 status (valued above
$1 billion), and took 8 years before Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquired it in 2017 for
$650 million in cash plus roughly
$50 million in employee retention incentives.
Just months after that exit, in 2017, Kempel founded Bond — now his third major company nine years in. Another unicorn in the making, or am I getting ahead of myself?
Not financial advice. Do your own research of course — I write the core from my own experiences and use Grok to clean up grammar/flow, but everything else is authentic and facts only. Any forward-looking comments or speculation about future events (such as a potential sale) are clearly marked as my personal opinion unless otherwise stated.