M&A roundup - week ending 2/20/16

Steven Loeb · February 20, 2016 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/436e

Amazon bought Emvantage; Fandango picked up Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster; Google acquired Pie

Amazon acquired Indian payments company Emvantage. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

The Emvantage team will be coming to work at Amazon, developing payment products and solutions aimed at the Indian market. There is no indication that Amazon will be incorporating any of Emvantage's technology. 

The deal is expected to close at some point during the first quarter of this year. 

IBM acquired health data and analytics company Truven Health Analytics. The deal is worth $2.6 billion.

IBM plans to integrate Truven’s cloud-based data set, which spans hundreds of different types of cost, claims, quality and outcomes information, with its existing data sets, all of which will be added to IBM Watson Health portfolio. Over time, IBM will integrate Truven's cloud-based technology, methodologies and health claims data. Truven will not be shutting down operations. 

Founded over 40 years ago, Truven has more than 8,500 clients, including U.S. federal and state government agencies, employers, health plans, hospitals, clinicians and life sciences companies.

Bloglovin', a social discovery platform for blogsacquired Sverve, a mobile focused startup studio. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Swerve has been rebranded as Activate by Bloglovin’ but will remain focused on providing its users with monetization campaign opportunities and community support.

Bloglovin’ has over 750k registered content creators on the platform, and over 8 million active users.

Movie ticket website Fandango acquired movie and TV review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, as well as Flixster, a community where users share film reviews and ratings, from from Warner Bros. Entertainment. The financial terms of these deals were not disclosed. 

Flixster and Rotten Tomatoes reach 20 million unique visitors per month combined, and will remain consumer-facing brands. With this acquisition, Fandango’s combined audience reach will grow to more than 63 million unique visitors per month. Flixster has more than 50 million app installs and, together, Flixster and Fandango’s mobile app downloads total more than 100 million.

As part of the deal, Warner Bros. Entertainment will take a minority ownership stake in Fandango and serve as an ongoing strategic partner. Fandango will continue to operate as a unit of NBCUniversal.

Founded in 1998, Rotten Tomatoes had raised $1.01 million in venture funding, while Flixster, founded in 2006, had raised $7.18 million.

Google acquired Singapore-based communications service Pie. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Pie will be shut down on March 2, 2016, and will remain independent until then. The Pie team will be joining Google in Singapore to help kick-start its new engineering team in the country.

Founded in 2013, Pie had raised $2 million in venture funding from GREE Ventures and Wavemakeer Partners, among others. 

GSN Games, a provider of social casino games and cash tournaments, acquired social casino studio Plumbee. Financial terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Plumbee is best known for its successful Mirrorball Slots app, which boasts more than 10 million downloads on Facebook and mobile devices. 

Founded in 2011, Plumbee had raised $15.8 million in venture funding from Endemol and Idinvest Partners. The studio has a team of more than 40 employees. 

Conversion rate optimization tool Clicktale acquired mobile analytics provider FlightRecorder. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

FlightRecorder has been rebranded as ClickTale for Apps, which will work for both native and hybrid apps, and includes features such as user session replays, crash reports, data insights, mobile analytics, and heat maps. It will be offered as an all-in-one SDK for iOS and Android.

Founded in 2014 FlightRecorder has offices in San Francisco and in Istanbul, Turkey.

Thirstie, an alcohol discovery-to-delivery service, entered into an agreement to acquire DrinkFly, an on-demand alcohol delivery company. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The DrinkFly acquisition will grow Thirstie's existing footprint in the U.S., particularly in Chicago. DrinkFly has a presence in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Dallas, Houston and New York.

Thirstie will acquire DrinkFly's users, with projections for doubling DrinkFly's month-over-month growth. Alex and Will Cullen, co-founders of DrinkFly, will take on an advisory role at Thirstie and transition DrinkFly's retail partners and customers to the combined entity.

Pivotal, a provider of enterprise PaaS-based solutions, acquired software development agency Neo. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Neo will be shutting down, and will extend Pivotal's ability to help companies around the globe.

Neo is based in Singapore and San Francisco. It has worked with companies such as Adobe, eBay, Time, and the government of Singapore.

Palantir, which offers a suite of software applications for integrating, visualizing and analyzing information, acquired Kimono Labs, which turns websites into structured APIs from a browser. 

Kimono Labs will be shutting down at the end of the month, but it has created Kimono for Desktop, a light-weight desktop version of kimono to ease the transition.

Founded in 2014, Kimono was used by over 125,000 developers, data scientists and businesses. The company had raised $5 million in venture funding 

Vidooly, an online video analytics and marketing platform, acquired iCouchApp, which allows its users to discover new videos and interact with their favorite TV shows. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

With this acquisition, iCouchApp's expertise in the OTT segment will allow Vidooly to provide actionable data across VOD platforms.

In addition, iCouchApp also allows media companies to create and maintain their own OTT app through exclusive and branded mobile apps. Content creators signed up with Vidooly can now build their own custom mobile apps.

Afimilk, a provider of dairy farm management solutions, acquired Silent Herdsman, a developer of a neck-collar monitoring system used to detect estrus and health problems in dairy cows. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The Silent Herdsman triggers its alert via wireless technology to any mobile device such as a farmer’s mobile phone, tablet or laptop. Its wireless technology can travel over long distances meaning it is suitable for farms hosting 100 to 20,000 cows. Its unique differentiator includes monitoring herds across large geographical distances on farms hosting several thousand beef or dairy cows.

Formed in 2009, the Glasgow-based company has raised $4.55 million in venture funding from Albion Ventures, Scottish Equity Partners and Scottish Investment Bank. 

Fox Technologies,  acquired GroundWork Open Source Inc. Based in San Francisco, GroundWork provides unified monitoring solutions for IT operations management, performance analysis, and cloud monitoring. GroundWork allows customers the flexibility to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy IT management tools.
 

Fox Technologies, a cybersecurity company, acquired GroundWork Open Source, a provider of unified monitoring solutions. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The acquisition advances Fox Technologies' mission to be the leading global system management company.

Based in San Francisco, GroundWork provides unified monitoring solutions for IT operations management, performance analysis, and cloud monitoring. GroundWork allows customers the flexibility to leverage the advantages of open source while simultaneously preserving existing investments in legacy IT management tools.

Founded in 2004, it raised $29 million in venture funding. 

CartoDB, a company for location intelligence, data analysis and visualization, acquired Nutiteq, a mobile mapping software development company. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Nutiteq’s current SDK offering, including on-device analytics and vector rendering, will be augmented with CartoDB’s cloud location analytics and self-service products. This will provide a complete solution for companies building external facing apps or productivity tools on mobile.

Founded in 2006, Nutiteq has with more than 15 million unique installations of their SDK, and a roster of clients that includes SeatGeek, LonelyPlanet, iRobot and Accenture, among others.

SAP SE acquired mobile business application developer Roambi. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

With the acquisition of the Roambi suite of solutions and related key assets, SAP intends to continue delivering innovations that enable users with tangible, easy-to-use analytics solutions that can retrieve relevant data anywhere, anytime.

suite of solutions and related key assets, SAP intends to bring mobile access to analytics to everyone. In addition, SAP unveiled new predictive capabilities to analysts, developers and partners with SAP Predictive Analytics software planned for availability in the near future. 

Founded in 2008, Roambi raised $48.35 million in venture funding.

InVision, a prototyping and UI mockup tool, acquired mobile message service Relay. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

The company has not yet decided if Relay, or its first product, Iconic, will be shutting down.

The Toronto-based Relay had raise $700,000 in venture funding.

ShowingTime, a company that develops a real estate lead capture, calendaring, and notification engine, acquired RealEstate Business Intelligence, a source of real estate data, analytics and business intelligence. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The acquisition will deepen ShowingTime's Analytics Group offering, enabling customers to gain a richer understanding of their local real estate markets.

RealEstate Business Intelligence delivers local market statistics and trends to 142 MLS organizations and nearly 500,000 agents across North America. Its SmartCharts Pro and MARKETrends Premium products and services are used by another 30,000 subscribers.

Instart Logic, a provider of application delivery solutions, acquired Kwicr, a provider of application acceleration for Apple and Android platforms. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

With this acquisition, Instart Logic is also opening a Boston office to accommodate the Kwicr team. Instart Logic will integrate Kwicr’s SDK into its application delivery platform to provide a comparable degree of control and visibility that its Nanovisor.js provides for web applications.

Founded in 2012, Kwicr had raised $8.14 million in venture funding.

Inspired Thinking Group, a provider of marketing software acquired data management specialist Creator. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Creator founder Mark Brennan will continues as CEO of the renamed ITG Creator. With the acquisition of Creator, ITG now employs over 500 marketing and technology specialists.

The acquisition of Creator, which specialises in electronic customer relationship management (eCRM), will enable ITG to offer a deeper level of marketing intelligence and customer insight to clients.

(Image source: alexmandossian.com)

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