After a pandemic-induced lull in deal activity in 2020, last year was wall-to-wall consolidation across the media and marketing technology sectors. Total deal making activity in 2021 was up more than 82% year over year, according to LUMA’s 2021 market report, released last week.
Is ad tech’s hot streak on the public market sustainable? No, and that’s not a bad thing. After four quarters of spiking valuations and an IPO runway so crowded that one ad tech company opted to postpone its IPO until next year, the market is starting to stabilize. Although some ad tech stocks achieved all-time […]
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 […]
