M&A roundup - week ending 9/19/15

Altice agreed to acquire Cablevision; News. Corp bought Unruly; Ericsson purchased Envivio

News. Corp acquired social video advertising platform Unruly.  The expected purchase price for the acquisition is as high as £114 million, or $176 million.

That includes a cash payment at closing of £58 million, approximately $90 million, which is subject to certain adjustments. It also includes another £56 million, or approximately $86 million, in future consideration primarily, which is related to "payments contingent upon the achievement of certain performance objectives."

Unruly was co-founded by Co-Chief Executive Officer Scott Button, Co-Chief Executive Officer Sarah Wood and Chief Technology Officer Matt Cooke. All three will continue to lead the company, which will operate as a separate business unit, and it will continue to be headquartered in Shoreditch in London.

The co-founders will be reporting to Rebekah Brooks, Chief Executive of News UK.

Mobile massage service Soothe acquired smaller competitor Unwind Me, helping Soothe add additional therapists to its growing network. The price of the acquisition was undisclosed.

Soothe will integrate Unwind Me’s supply-side scheduling technology into its platform. Unwind Me’s current clients will have to go over to the Soothe platform, but will be able to use existing Unwind Me credits.

Unwind Me started in 2014, went through the popular Y-Combinator program, and raised $1 million. Whereas Soothe started in 2013, and quickly raised $2.1 million from notable angels, such as Gil Penchina and Scott and Cyan Banister.

Qualcomm Life, a subidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, acquired Capsule Technologie, a provider of medical device integration and clinical data management solutions. Financial terms of the deal were undisclosed. 

Combining Qualcomm Life's wireless expertise and ecosystem of connected medical devices outside of the hospital with Capsule's leadership for connecting medical devices, EMR's and IT systems across the hospital enterprise, will create one of the world's largest open connected health ecosystems to deliver intelligent care.

Capsule, with has more than 1,930 hospital clients in 38 countries. will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm Life.

Doctor search platform Practo aqcuired healthcare management firm Insta Health. The deal was valued at $12 million.

Insta Health provides a cloud based hospital information management solution for hospitals across 15 countries in India, South East Asia, Middle East and Africa.

The company will operate as a separate division and will continue to be led by Ramesh Emani, Founder and CEO of Insta Health.

Spanish restaurant booking startup Restalo acquired local competitor Restaurantes.com. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Post-acquisition, the two merged entities will operate under the Restaurantes.com brand with offices in Madrid and Barcelona. Antonio Fernández Ruiz and Jesús Alonso Gallo, the two founders of Restaurantes.com will join the new management team led by Pablo Pastega, current CEO of Restalo.

Combining two platforms makes Restaurantes.com the largest table booking service in Spain. It claims 6,000 partner restaurants across the country, and 1.2 million users who have reserved a table.

Managed cloud hosting company Bulletproof agreed to acquire Infoplex, a Managed Private Cloud company that utilises third party data centres in Sydney and Melbourne. The deal was priced at $3.55 million cash.

Infoplex, part of the Nextgen Group, manages and hosts blue chip customers’ private cloud requirements for core enterprise applications. Its clients include the Australian operations of a global financial institution that leverages Infoplex’s Sydney & Melbourne data centre footprint to host its mission critical applications in a high performance, fully redundant managed private cloud. 

The company has earings of $1.4 million annually.

HomeLane.com, an online home solutions provider of modular kitchen and other home furnishing solutions, acquired Doowup, a provider of personalised home decor “Shop-the-Look” experience. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2014, Doowup enables consumers to browse through and customise a host of curated designer looks in the context of their own homes. Consumers can interact with these experiences across web, mobile, and virtual reality mediums.

As per the terms of the acquisition, Doowup’s founding team will join HomeLane. Doowup’s Founder, Vivek Seetharaman, will be joining HomeLane as their Chief Innovation Officer. 

Swedish payment-services company Bambora Group has offered to buy Beanstream Internet Commerce from U.S. rival Digital River, as part of a $120 million push into North America.

Founded in 2000 and based in Canada, Beanstream provides payments services, risk management and authentication solutions and has a workforce of 50. The company was bought by Digital Rive for $103 million in 2012.

Bambora, whose clients include Swedish music streaming company Spotify AB, was created in May through the consolidation of several, small payment-services firms. Bambora has 530 employees, and handles an estimated $50 billion in annual transactions, of which about 70% are online.

Suvidhaa Infoserve a payment and remittance firm, acquired point of sale startup Aasaanpay. The deal amount remains undisclosed.

Aasaanpay was started in 2011. Its technology helps carry out transactions via smartphone instead of a traditional bulky POS machine.

Suvidhaa plans to use Aasaanpay’s technology to tap into the 150 million cards issued by the Indian government under the Jandhan Yojana. This acquisition will fast-track Suvidhaa’s plan to reach small merchants, especially in rural areas.

Aasaanpay secured seed funding from Tvarita Capital three years ago.

EnglishCentral, a provider of online English conversation solutions, entered into an agreement to acquire Langrich, an online English tutoring company in Japan. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Langrich’s shareholders, KLAB Ventures, a leading gaming company in Japan, and Hitomedia, an educational incubator in Japan, exchanged shares in Langrich for shares in EnglishCentral. 

The combination of EnglishCentral and Langrich creates the first English learning platform that fully integrates interactive video learning with 1:1 online tutoring to guarantee results for English as a Second Language (ESL) students.

CEB, a practice insight and technology company, has agreed to acquire Wanted Technologies, a provider of real-time market intelligence and analytics for staffing and talent sourcing professionals.

Shareholders of Wanted Technologies will receive cash consideration of C$1.79 per share,  which equals roughly (C)$45 million.

By integrating Wanted Technologies' machine learning-based talent analytics with CEB's predictive talent data offered through its CEB TalentNeuron offering, CEB will be uniquely positioned to help businesses leverage talent intelligence for more impactful workforce planning.

Ericsson agreed to acquire software-based video processing and delivery solutions company Envivio. The offer was for a price of USD 4.10 per share in cash, or approximately $125 million.

 Envivio generated revenues of USD 43 million during full year 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Envivio was founded in 2000 and has a staff of approximately 200 employees worldwide. Its customers include Comcast, Cox Communications, Liberty Global, Sky, Telstra and Time Warner Cable. 

The acquisition will strengthen Ericsson's video compression position, combining its leading position in broadcast and contribution with Envivio's leadership in multiscreen cable and telecom. Envivio's cloud-centric and software-based video capabilities will be a key addition to Ericsson's portfolio of media enrichment, processing, publishing, delivery, and TV platforms, enabling TV experiences on any device.  

Financial software firm IRESS acquired two financial technology businesses: Proquote Limited, a provider of trading, market data and connectivity solutions in the United Kingdom, owned by the London Stock Exchange Group since 2003; and Pulse Software Systems, a provider of portfolio management software for private asset managers who manage investments for clients on a discretionary basis. The combined purchase price is £35.61 million.

Proquote operates a request for quote trading connectivity network to Retail Service Providers, while Pulse is an established provider of portfolio management software solutions to private asset managers, those who manage investments for clients on a discretionary basis. 

As part of these transactions, a total of 55 people from Proquote and Pulse will join IRESS, including Proquote’s Managing Director, David Tibbetts, and Pulse’s Managing Director and Founder, Mike Nicholls.

Accenture, a consulting company, acquired Cloud Sherpas, a cloud advisory and technology services specializing in Google,Salesforce and ServiceNow. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Once the deal is completed, more than 1,100 professionals from Cloud Sherpas are expected to join the newly created Accenture Cloud First Applications team, which delivers cloud services for Google, NetSuite, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday and other “pure play” technologies.

Cloud Sherpas had raised $63.3 million in venture funding.

Disappearing content app Snapchat acquired facial recognition startup Looksery. The price of the deal was $150 million.

Started two years ago, Looksery uses facial recognition technology to photoshop video chats and messages in real time. Looksery launched with a Kickstarter campaign in June 2014 and six face filters. It reportedly has about 3 million downloads. 

Snapchat may be using the technology already in its new “Lenses” featur,  which its launched on Tuesday. Lenses lets people add filters to their selfies so they become animated before they send snaps.

The same week that Apple closed down HopStop, it also acquired mapping data visualization company Mapsense. The price of the deal was between $25 million and $30 million.

The 12-person Mapsense team, which will be joining Apple. 

Formed in 2013, Mapsense raised $2.5 million in a seed round led by General Catalyst with other backers including Amplify.LA and Redpoint Ventures.

 Purch, a digital content and commerce company, acquired Active Junky, a loyalty platform and online shopping community. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. 

With the acquisition, Purch gains a shopping community, as well as a customer rewards and loyalty platform serving the Outdoor Enthusiast market. As part of the Purch family of brands, Active Junky will remain a stand-alone property that supports the active outdoor vertical market.  The anticipated rollout of its customer loyalty platform across Purch's properties is slated for early 2016.

Active Junky had raised $1.3 million in venture funding, 

European cable company Altice agreed to acquire American cable television company Cablevision. Under the agreement, Altice will deliver $34.90 in cash for each Cablevision share, which comes to a total of $10 billion.

Together both operators represent the 4th largest cable operation in the US market.

The acquisition also includes Lightpath, the company’s business services unit; News 12 Networks, a 24-hour local television news network in the US; Newsday Media Group with the Newsday newspaper; and Cablevision Media Sales, the company’s advertising sales division.

The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2016, subject to regulatory and other customary approvals.

Cineplex, Canada’s largest chain of movie theater, acquired the assets of online gaming platform WorldGaming. As part of the deal, Cineplex will invest $10 million to acquire the assets in exchange for 80% ownership of the new company, as well as invest an additional $5 million to expand the business model.

Through this acquisition Cineplex has created a new league that will operate and oversee future in-theatre eSports tournaments hosted across Canada. The online portion of the tournaments will be hosted on WorldGaming’s proprietary gaming platform.

The league’s first national tournament us scheduled for October 2015.

8K Miles Software Services, a provider of secure Cloud solutions, acquired NexAge Technologies USA, a regulatory compliance and technology solutions firm. The total consideration for the deal is $3 million, in combination of cash and stock and includes the existing NexAge's debt of $800,000.

The agreement includes acquisition of Intellectual Property, technical solutions, client contracts, and employees.

Through this acquisition, 8K Miles gains access to the network of Enterprise customers and strategic partners acquired by NexAge during the last decade.

Chronic care management solution Persivia, completed the transaction to acquire IHM Services Company, a provider of clinical intelligence solutions for hospitals. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The merger with IHM allows for Persivia to add inpatient care solutions to existing hospital clients that include 200 implementations and over 15,000 ambulatory physician users.

Payment technology solutions company First Data acquired  automated ecommerce platform Spree Commerce. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Going forward, Spree will continue to operate as part of First Data. Spree will remain in Washington D.C., and is currently looking to expand its team. 

Spree Commerce had raised $6.5 million in venture funding.

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