Remember when telcos wanted to be digital media companies? That was so 2017. On Monday, private equity firm Apollo Global Management announced its intention to acquire Verizon Media for $5 billion. The new company will be called Yahoo – yes, for real – and Verizon will maintain a minority 10% stake in it. Read the release. […]
Add another ad tech IPO to the pile, folks. DoubleVerify filed its S-1 Wednesday (read it) in its bid to IPO. According to the filing, DoubleVerify experienced strong but slowing revenue growth last year. Gross revenue in 2020 was $244 million, a 34% increase from 2019 revenue of $183 million. The company’s 2018 revenue meanwhile […]
When we last checked in with Google for its quarterly earnings in Q3, it was printing money. And in Q4, it printed some more – because advertisers are coming back. Read the release. Google’s 2020 Q4 revenues hit $56.9 billion led by YouTube and its search business. That figure is up 23% YoY from $46.1 […]
Here’s 2020 in a nutshell from the investment banker’s point of view: “Turmoil caused acceleration and unexpected change, and it was a breeding ground for opportunity,” says Conor McKenna, a VP at LUMA Partners. After stalling to near zero during the first three months of the pandemic, conversations and negotiations started to pick up again […]
The more the merrier. App attribution company AppsFlyer has a late breaking addition to its $210 million investment round, which closed in January: Salesforce Ventures. Although Salesforce is only taking a small percentage of AppsFlyer as part of the round extension – less than 1% of the company, according to AppsFlyer CEO and co-founder Oren […]
This SSP is going IPO. PubMatic is gearing up for a proposed $75 million initial public offering after filing an S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. The company, founded in 2006, is one of the ad tech old guard and planning to list its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq Global […]
After a harsh first half of the year – Q2 was particularly gloomy – the M&A market is starting to rebound. Deal activity was up in the third quarter with particular momentum in gaming and digital audio, although ad tech and mar tech made a respectable showing, according to a Q3 market report from investment […]
The tech investment fund C2 Ventures (C2V), founded by mobile ad tech entrepreneur Chris Cunningham, said Monday that one of its previous investments – Boostr – raised $7 million, at a valuation that triples what it had last year. Boostr founder and CEO Patrick O’Leary did not disclose terms of the deal or the company’s […]
Venture capital is venturing carefully during the coronavirus crisis. But raising money is possible, economic uncertainty aside, for companies with differentiated technology and a healthy customer base, especially if they’re focused on digital transformation. On Tuesday, Glassbox, an Israeli startup with offices in London and New York that offers customer experience analytics for sites and […]
It was a chilly Q1 for ad tech deal-making, and you can expect more of the same in the second quarter. But you can’t blame it all on COVID-19 – at least not entirely. The ongoing health crisis is only accelerating trends that were already rolling, said Terry Kawaja, CEO and founder of investment bank LUMA […]
It’s boom time for billboards. On Tuesday, OOH automation platform AdQuick announced a $6 million Series A round led by existing investor Initialized Capital – Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s early stage venture capital firm – with participation from WndrCo; Shrug Capital; The Todd & Rahul Angel Fund; Michael Kassan, chairman and CEO of MediaLink; and […]
YouTube drove $15 billion in ad revenue in fiscal 2019, according to Alphabet’s Q4 and FY results, released Monday. Read the release. This is the first time Google has disclosed YouTube’s revenues, which have grown briskly over the past three years – from $8.2 billion in 2017 and $11.2 billion in 2018. Alphabet will now […]
Attention Capital executive partner Lisa Gersh will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference in New York on Jan. 28-29, 2020. Lisa Gersh knows a good brand investment when she sees one. Before joining new media venture group Attention Capital as an executive partner over the summer, Gersh spent most of her career in key […]
Ad tech had a stellar 2019. You heard that right. The year started slow for ad tech M&A, but merger activity gained steam and the fourth quarter was one of the most active in recent memory, according to a Q4 market report released Tuesday from investment bank LUMA Partners. The number of scaled deals worth […]
Mobile data company Ogury raised $50 million in Series C funding on Thursday with an eye on international expansion and consumer privacy-related R&D. The round, led by existing investor Idinvest Partners, brings the company’s total funding to $92 million over the last six years, and follows a $21 million extension of its Series B in […]
What does physical commodities trading have in common with programmatic advertising? Quite a lot. So it makes sense that ad tech godfather and AppNexus founder Brian O’Kelley is revving up a new startup called CMDTY (pronounced “commodity”) that aims to apply data and technology to the old-school industry of supply chain and logistics management. His […]
You haven’t seen any marketing for Disney+ yet, but you’re about to. Disney is on the verge of a marketing blitz for its direct-to-consumer streaming service. The campaign will kick off in late August and run across traditional, digital and Disney owned-and-operated channels leading up to the service’s planned launch date on Nov. 12. It’s […]
Industry insiders were largely puzzled when LinkedIn said it would buy cross-device linkage company Drawbridge in May. LinkedIn buried the announcement in a blog post, and the LinkedIn-Drawbridge synergies weren’t obvious, so it made sense to assume the purchase was either an acqui-hire or a fire sale. But, according to two AdExchanger sources, LinkedIn paid […]
Tealium has raised $55 million in new funding, its sixth round, the company said Wednesday. The round, led by Silver Lake Waterman with participation from ABN AMRO, Bain Capital and a smorgasbord of others, brings its total funding to $160 million since 2012. Most of the cash will go toward growth in order to capitalize […]
Pinterest’s valuation in its amended S-1 released today is lower than the $12 billion it was gunning for last year. With price per share ranging from $15 to $17, Pinterest is valued between $10 billion and $11.3 billion. Could this lower-than-expected valuation indicate skepticism about Pinterest’s core business? Elgin Thompson, managing director of Digital Capital […]
Investors are well over their brief love affair with independent ad tech, but other categories –namely mar tech, customer data platforms (CDPs) and advanced TV technology – are now catching their eye. Why? In a word: growth. “Growth is still what commands exit premiums – growth is what people pay for,” said Deborah Farrington, founder and […]
If you’re a mature marketing technology platform: Congrats. 2018 was your year and the future looks bright. But if you’re an ad tech company without a unique value prop that’s jonesing for an exit, apologies, the outlook remains fairly bleak. Although digital advertising is still growing – it’s a $100 billion market today – Google and Facebook […]
JEGI Co-President Tolman Geffs will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Industry Preview conference on Jan. 23-24, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt New York. “There’s been a hell of a pullback investing in anything that remotely smells like ad tech,” according to Tolman Geffs, co-president of investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group Inc. But that’s not as dire […]
Drawbridge is one of the cross-device OGs, but it’s in the midst of a pivot. The company revealed $15 million in new financing on Monday from existing investors Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Northgate. The money, which brings Drawbridge’s total funding to $70 million, will be immediately invested into a product road map focused on non-advertising-related […]
Elgin Thompson, managing director of Digital Capital Advisors, will speak at AdExchanger’s upcoming Programmatic IO conference on April 10-11 at the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco. The passion of Wall Street’s 2013-era love affair with ad tech may have cooled, but investment banker Elgin Thompson expects the industry will produce some noteworthy exits yet. “I […]
Paris-based ecommerce analytics platform ContentSquare has raised a $42 million Series B round from a series of investors including US VC firm Canaan and Highland Europe. ContentSquare previously had raised $20 million, bringing it to a total of $62 million after this round. The company will use the financing to support research and development of […]
In recent years, enterprise giants like Salesforce, Oracle, IBM and Adobe monopolized M&A activity as each marketing cloud raced to buy their way into ad tech. That tide has turned. These days, strategic acquisitions are more about expanding access to content, audiences and new means of distribution. Just look to media company team-ups like Disney-21st […]
2017 was a busy year of M&A for the digital media and marketing sector, according to reports released by investment banks JEGI and Luma Partners this week. Last year included 2,000 transactions in the sector hitting $272 billion in deal value, according to JEGI. It was the fourth consecutive year of increasing transaction value in […]
Facebook and Google are no longer the ad tech acquirers they once were, and yet, the M&A landscape of 2017 is littered with their fingerprints. Media companies swallowed one other to add scale and massive amounts of content to stave off the duopoly’s dominance. Just look at Meredith-Time, AT&T-Time Warner and Disney-Fox. AT&T’s bid for […]
Nexstar Media Group revealed on Thursday its intent to acquire mobile video platform LKQD for $90 million. The all-cash transaction is accretive and subject to certain terms, including LKQD maintaining a $10 million minimum cash balance. LKQD’s payment is also contingent upon its performance under Nexstar for the next two years. The deal is expected […]
