M&A roundup - week ending 11/7/15

Activision bought King; Sprinklr acquired Booshaka; Expedia purchased HomeAway

Social media management platform Sprinklr acquired Booshaka, a company that helps marketers leverage customer data to increase sales and engagement. No financial terms of the deal were disclose.

Booshaka technology will be integrated with Sprinklr’s Experience Cloud, which will allow brands to apply real-time audience segmentation to social data. Booshaka's 10 person team will be moving to Sprinklr’s San Francisco office. Erik Ober, CEO at Booshak, will be reporting to Simon Mansell, General Manager of Paid and Services at Sprinklr.

Booshaka had raised $2 million in a convertible note from investors that included FF Angel, Rothenberg Ventures, Signatures Capital, Streamlined Ventures and numerous angels.

Expedia acquired vacation rentals company HomeAway. The price of the acquisition was $3.9 billion in cash and Expedia common stock, representing a per share price for HomeAway shares of $38.31, based on Expedia's closing price on November 3, 2015.

HomeAway was founded in 2005, and it hosts 1.2 million listings.  The HomeAway portfolio includes VRBO.com and VacationRentals.com in the United States; HomeAway.co.uk and OwnersDirect.co.uk in the United Kingdom; HomeAway.de in Germany; Abritel.fr and Homelidays.com in France; HomeAway.es and Toprural.es in Spain; AlugueTemporada.com.br in Brazil; HomeAway.com.au and Stayz.com.au in Australia; Bookabach.co.nz in New Zealand, and Asia Pacific short-term rental site, travelmob.com.

The companies expect the transaction to close in the first quarter of 2016.

Game publisher Activision Blizzard, the company behind games that include Call of Duty and Guitar Hero, acquired King Digital Entertainment, the company behind Candy Crush Saga.

ABS Partners, a wholly owned subsidiary of Activision Blizzard, will acquire all of the outstanding shares of King for $18.00 in cash per share, for a total equity value of $5.9 billion. Activision is paying a 26 percent premium over King's stock price on October 30, which was $14.96 a share.

The boards of directors of both companies have already unanimously approved the deal, though it is subject to approval by King’s shareholders and the Irish High Court, clearances by the relevant antitrust authorities and other customary closing conditions. It is currently expected to be completed by Spring of 2016.

New Relic acquired cloud infrastructure monitoring company Opsmatic. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Opsmatic provides real-time visibility into critical configuration changes that affect a company’s dynamic cloud infrastructure. It's technology will be integrated into New Relic.

Founded in 2013, Opsmatic raised a $3 million in seed funding.

Delivery service Postmates acquired the team that built social platform Sosh. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Sosh founders Rishi Mandal and Vivek Patel, as well as a group of  accomplished engineers, product managers, designers, and operations specialists who will join Postmates at its headquarters in San Francisco. These new team members will play an integral role in continuing to accelerate the Postmates product and business.

 The company had raised $16.25 million in venture funding.

Adobe acquired the Digital Analytix big data business intelligence service from comScore. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Adobe and comScore will work together to ensure current workflows in customers’ analytics practices are not disrupted. Digital Analytix customers will also continue to have access to their comScore account managers through the closing and beyond. Finally, Adobe intends to take good care of Digital Analytix customers and will honor the terms of all existing Digital Analytix contracts.

The deal is expected to close in December.

Outerwall, the automated kiosk operator, acquired “certain assets and liabilities” Gazelle.com, an online site that buys and sells pre-owned consumer electronics. The deal is worth $18 million in cash.

Gazelle, which is headquartered in Boston and has operations facilities in Kentucky, has around 100 employees. Details of the acquisition are still being finalized.

The company has raised nearly $56 million from investors including Venrock Associates, RockPort Capital Partners and Physic Ventures.

Chef, a provider of automation for DevOps launched a new compliance capabilities built on technology from VulcanoSec, a security software company based in Germany, that it acquired. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Chef is integrating Chef Compliance with Chef Delivery to bring compliance into the DevOps workflow.

Using VulcanoSec’s innovative technology, Chef Compliance includes compliance profiles – audit rules in the form of code – to validate that a production node is properly configured. Any necessary remediation can then be systematically applied with Chef’s automation framework.

IBM acquired cloud brokerage firm Gravitant. No financial terms were disclosed.

IBM plans to integrate the Gravitant capabilities into the IBM Global Technology Services unit. In addition, IBM Cloud plans to integrate the capabilities into Software-as-a-Service offerings, extending the company’s growing hybrid cloud solutions and capabilities.

Founded in 2004, Gravitant is headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has development operations in Pune and Bangalore, India. The company had raised $40.26 million in venture funding.

Marketing data and analytics company Neustar agreed to acquire marketing technology company MarketShare Partners. The price is said to be $450 million.

The addition of MarketShare will enable Neustar to offer a complete, data-driven solution to CMOs as they plan, optimize, and allocate their online and offline marketing budgets and resources. In the increasingly complex world in which major brands operate, this really matters.

MarketShare had raised $96 million in venture funding.

Permira, an international private equity firm, in partnership with Banneker Partners, acquired the Marketing Solutions division of eBay Enterprise.

Additionally, the customer relationship management division within the Marketing Solutions division of eBay Enterprise, including the email, hosted database, and attribution businesses, was purchased by Zeta Interactive, a data-driven marketing technology company.

Genoa, a QoL Healthcare Company, launched Genoa Telepsychiatry with its acquisition of 1DocWay, an outpatient telepsychiatry provider that offers a platform to connect mental health providers and patients. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Going forward, 1DocWay will operate its enterprise services under the name Genoa Telepsychiatry.

Founded in 2011, 1DocWay had raised $1.7 million in venture funding from iSeed Ventures, Waterline Ventures, Rock Health, Asset Management Ventures, DreamIt Ventures and others.

FastMail, a provider of email hosting for businesses, acquired Pobox which provides email forwarding, filtering and domains services, and Listbox, an email service provider. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

FastMail will continue to operate Pobox and Listbox as normal, with no significant changes planned for the immediate future.

FastMail is a wholly privately owned business headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. It was founded by Rob Mueller and Jeremy Howard in 1999 and is the choice of businesses and professional email users around the world.

S​ilvertree I​nternet Holdings and Kevin Tucker acquired PriceCheck, anonline price comparison platform, from global media giant, Naspers. The financial terms of the deal were undisclosed.

PriceCheck is Africa’s largest price comparison service, with over five million products listed from retailers including Zando, Konga and Jumia. The platform now sees 25 million unique annual visitors across its two platforms.

Exiting CEO Andre de Wet is stepping aside from his role after five years of heading up PriceCheck. Tucker, who founded PriceCheck, will be its new CEO.

Mi9 Retail, a provider of enterprise retail merchandising, business intelligence and store operations software, acquired Raymark Xpert Business Systems, a provider of retail software solutions. No financial terms were disclosed.

The combined company allows them to offer a broad suite of real-time enabled applications, including merchandising, analytics, point of sale, omni-channel, clienteling and CRM.  

Raymark will continue supporting and developing all existing applications.

Atos, The Gores Group and Siemens have reached an agreement for European IT services corporation Atos to acquire Unify, an integrated communication solutions provider. No financial terms were disclosed.

With this acquisition Atos intends to create a unique integrated proposition for unified communications and real time capabilities enhancing social collaboration, digital transformation, and business performance of its clients.

The transaction is subject to employee representative’s bodies’ information and consultation and the approvals of the regulatory and antitrust authorities. Closing is expected in the first calendar quarter of 2016.

SignUpGenius, a tool for volunteer management and event planning, acquired Jooners, an online sign up site. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

The acquisition allows the company consolidate the online sign up field. SignUpGenius provides online sign ups for volunteer and event management for up to 10 million site visitors a month.

The acquisition is expected to close December 31.

Anoto Group AB, a provider of digital writing and drawing solutions, acquired smartpen maker Livescribe. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

As part of this agreement, Anoto is acquiring Livescribe's entire business operations, technology, and intellectual property. The Livescribe brand and existing infrastructure will be retained, with a goal of strengthening the position of both companies through the development and sale of new products.
Livescribe will be fully integrated with Anoto as a wholly-owned subsidiary, with the deal expected to close later this month.

Founded in 2007, Livescribe had raised $68 million in venture funding.

Google has acquired Fly Labs, an app for editing mobile videos. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

The Fly Labs team is joining the Google Photos team and its technology will be folded into Google Photos. The apps will be available on the App Store for another three months before they will be removed.

Fly Labs raised $750,000 in venture funding.

(Image source: businessnewsdaily.com)