luma partners

Overall deal activity in the ad tech market was down 10% year over year in 2023, according to LUMA Partners. But 2024 may be looking up.

Who got bought in 2023, and who did the buying? Here’s a non-exhaustive list of some of the most notable ad tech M&A activity from this past year (with a few media and agency deals tossed in for good measure).

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

Measurement and analytics company DoubleVerify touted its decision to acquire Paris-based AI startup Scibids for $125 million during its Q2 earnings call on Monday.

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.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. The LUMA Escape LUMA Partners – the investment bank of ad tech, essentially – is having a major fracture.  Brian Andersen, a co-founder and partner, along with partners Mark Greenbaum and Dick Filippini, are all exiting over a disagreement with co-founder and CEO […]

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.

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.

It would be nice if we never had to hear the word “uncertainty” ever again … but too bad, because Q2 happened, and it wasn’t pretty for ad tech. The public ad tech and mar tech stocks tracked by LUMA Partners, which released its Q2 market report last week, fell more than 30% across the board year-to-date as of the end of the second quarter.