French technology major Thales has signed an agreement  to buy cybersecurity company Imperva from Thoma Bravo in a deal valued at $3.6bn (€3.2bn).

Headquartered in San Mateo, California, Imperva is engaged in providing services to protect application programming interfaces (APIs), key applications, and data.

With a team of more than 1,400 people, the company has operations in the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe-Middle East and Africa.

Through the acquisition, Thales hopes to advance its cybersecurity operations, foray into the lucrative application security industry and grow in the data security sector.

According to Thales, the combination will result in about $110m in pre-tax run-rate savings, of which $50m will be related to cost synergies and $60m to revenue synergies.

Thales chairman and CEO Patrice Caine said: “The acquisition of Imperva marks a major milestone in Thales’ cybersecurity strategy. With this acquisition, we are seizing a unique opportunity to accelerate our cybersecurity capabilities and are taking an important step towards our ambition to build a world-class global cybersecurity integrated player, providing a comprehensive portfolio of products and services.”

Imperva CEO Pam Murphy said: “We admire Thales’ vision and culture, and believe that, together, we can deliver greater product innovation and efficiency through disruptive solutions, while helping to simplify the greatest security challenges facing organizations today: protecting digital identities, applications, APIs, and data in any environment, and any industry.”

Subject to anti-trust and regulatory approvals, the acquisition is expected to close in 2024.

Earlier this month, the French company said that it is holding exclusive talks to buy Cobham Aerospace Communications (AeroComms) for $1.1bn.

AeroComms specialises in developing antennas and transceivers for cockpit communication systems.