Investment

Digital media and marketing M&A is suffering from a prolonged case of anemia. The cause? Uncertainty in the market, according to LUMA Partners.

Aditude plans to spend the money doubling its headcount and enhancing its cloud-based prebid wrapper and other publisher tools.

Ad tech M&A has had a case of the Mondays since … late 2021. After the blistering pace of M&A during the height of the pandemic, deal activity in the ad tech sector slowed to a trickle in 2022 and has remained sluggish this year.

The company’s immediate plans for reinvesting its new capital include hiring more executive leadership to spearhead sales and partnerships, growing its engineering team and expanding its presence in the US and Japan.

On Tuesday, data collaboration and clean room platform Optable announced $20 million in Series A funding, with participation from Hearst Ventures, Brightspark Ventures, Desjardins Capital, Deloitte Ventures and asterX.

Tired in 2022: Growth at all costs. Wired in 2023: Realistic ad tech valuations. A return to Earth for ad tech and martech valuations is a good thing, says Conor McKenna, a partner at LUMA.

Despite rising interest rates and inflation, 2022 kicked off with a wave of M&A … that turned into a trickle … and became a relative dribble by the end of the year. Read on for a thorough (but non-exhaustive) refresher on M&A during the year that was.

Magnite’s quarterly revenue was up 11% year-over-year in Q3, with a large chunk of its growth coming from streaming. Growth guidance is conservative for next quarter, but Magnite expects AVOD inventory and retail media to become bigger growth drivers for its bottom line.

Commerce data platform Klover raised $25 million in Series B funding and changed its parent company name to Attain. The newly branded Attain will use the funding to launch what it’s calling a software-as-a-service (SaaS) commerce data platform for marketers.

Scaled ad tech M&A was up 150% in the third quarter, driven in part by private equity … so, hurrah? “I wouldn’t read too much into this, actually,” said Conor McKenna, a director at LUMA Partners, which released its Q3 market report in early October. The rise in M&A during the previous quarter is partially the result of a backlog from the first half of this year.