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Private equity firm Thoma Bravo LLC is in early talks to buy security software company McAfee from TPG Capital and Intel, a source familiar with the matter has revealed.
Talks are at an early stage and there is no guarantee they will lead to a deal, the source said. The talks were reported earlier by CNBC.
Intel and TPG declined to comment, while Thoma Bravo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Intel, which paid US$7.7 billion for California-based McAfee in 2011, completed the sale of a 51 per cent stake in the company to TPG at a US$4.2 billion enterprise value last year.
Thoma Bravo has been seeking to rapidly consolidate the cyber security sector.
In October, it announced a US$2.1 billion acquisition of Imperva and last month announced the acquisition of another cyber security firm called Veracode from Broadcom for US$950 million.
Last month, Reuters reported that Thoma Bravo had approached Symantec with a takeover offer.
(Reporting by Joshua Franklin in New York and Vibhuti Sharma in Bengaluru; editing by Grant McCool)
