M&A roundup - week ending 4/2/16

eBay acquired Cargigi; Flipkart bought PhonePe; Foxconn purchased Sharp

Tinder acquired contextual relationship and contact management platform Humin. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Humin 's two apps, Humin Contacts and Knock Knock, will continue to be available "for the time being."

Most of the Humin team is coming to Tinder, including company co-founders Ankur Jain and David Wyler. Jain will becomg Tinder's VP of Product, while Wyler will be Tinder's VP of Partnerships.

Jain and Wyler will actually be in charge of an unnamed "new product initiative," that uses Humin's technology.

Founded in 2014, Humin had raised $15 million from investors that included Eric Schmidt, Richard Branson, Ari Emanuel, Troy Carter, Kevin Spacey, Will.i.am and Jeb Bush Jr.

Hootsuite, a social media management company, acquired Sales Prodigy, a social media tool for sales executives. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Going forward, Sales Prodigy will be shutting down. The team at Sales Prodigy will be coming to work for Hootsuite, where they will be working in its Labs team.

Hootsuite also has plans to integrate Social Prodigy's technology into its platform, allowing Hootsuite's customers to find social selling opportunities and start conversations with prospects and customers in real-time on social media. 

Q&A website Quora acquired Parlio, a platform that was built to give its users the power to express their ideas about social change. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Parlio's content will continue to live on. Some of it will be republished on Quora, it was revealed in a note on Parlio's homepage, while the rest of its content will continue to be available. No new posts are being allowed on the site.

Launched in late 2014, Parlio had raised $1.68 million in seed funding from Betaworks, Cherubic Ventures, Founder Collective, Metamorphic Ventures, Newbury Ventures, and multiple angels. 

Brocade, a provider of data center networking solutions, acquired StackStorm, a provider of event driven automation. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The acquisition will help accelerate Brocade's efforts to bring DevOps style scalable open source automation to Brocade’s networking solutions. Under Brocade, the StackStorm technology will be extended to networking and new integrations will be developed for automation across IT domains such as storage, compute, and security.

StackStorm will continue to be available for its current customers.

IBM acquired Bluewolf Group, a provider of cloud consulting and implementation services. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Upon completion of this transaction, Bluewolf will join the existing Interactive Experience (iX) practice of IBM Global Business Services to form a deeper consulting capability for clients adopting the innovative Salesforce solutions that transform relationships with their customers.

Bluewolf will continue to develop solutions around Salesforce industry implementations.

NTT Data, the IT services company of NTT, acquired Dell Systems, an IT services provider. The price was $3.05 billion.

The combined company will become an IT and BPO solutions powerhouse for the healthcare industry with more than 40 years of industry experience and robust end-to-end solutions.

Dell Services will continue to operate under the leadership of Suresh Vaswani, president of Dell Services, reporting to Michael Dell, until the transaction closes.

Wells Fargo Securities acted as lead financial advisor to NTT DATA, Inc. J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC also acted as financial advisors to NTT DATA, Inc. Citigroup acted as lead financial advisor to Dell Inc.

Ebay acquired Cargigi, a provider of online advertising and marketing services for the auto industry. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Going forward, eBay will leverage Cargigi’s technology to help onboard auto dealers’ inventory onto eBay.com. Cargigi will replace eBay’s Dealer Center, providing sellers with the tools needed to streamline and enhance the vehicle selling process. 

The addition of Cargigi will also enable eBay to build out its structured data capabilities for the vehicles industry. 

Carigigi founder Tony Hoang, along with the team of more than 30 employees, including engineers and designers, will join the eBay Motors business unit.

Glovo, an on-demand delivery service , acquired Foodinho, a GPS food-delivery service. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed, but it was an all-cash that saw a “profit” for Foodinho’s investors.

This acquisition will help facilitate the Barcelona-based Glovo's international expansion. Matteo Pichi, Foodinho founder, will become Glovo’s new Country Manager in Italy.

The company's next market will be Paris.

Mars Petcare, the petcare division of the candy company, acquired Whistle, a device and mobile app system created to monitor a pet's activity and health. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

 Mars owns pet brands including Pedigree, Whiskas and Iams. The purchase was completed last month.

Founded in 2012, Whistle had raised $21 million in venture capital from investors that included Melo7 Technologies, Queensbridge, Slow Ventures, DCM Ventures and Qualcomm.

Foxconn, the multinational electronics contract manufacturing company, agreed to acquire Japan's Sharp Corp. The deal is worth $3.5 billion, or 88 yen per Sharp share.

The price is $900 million lower than a previous offer, following the emergence of previously undisclosed liabilities at Sharp.

Foxconn also agreed to buy all 200 billion yen ($1.7 billion) worth of preferred shares owned by Sharp's two main creditor banks. It also has the option of increasing its stake in Sharp next year.

Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, a technology-focused private equity firm, completed its acquisition of the QuickBase business from Intuit. No financial terms of the dealwere disclosed. 

Now called QuickBase Inc., the organization will continue to be led by CEO Allison Mnookin, as well as its current team of senior leaders, including Karen Devine, VP of Marketing; Jeff Prus, VP of Product Management; Frank Tino, VP of Product Development; Steve Percoco, VP of Sales and Customer Care.

QuickBase provides a low-code development platform to more than 6,000 business customers to enablethe creation and rapid deployment of customized, purpose-built cloud applications.

The acquisition was first announced last month. 

Viking Mergers & Acquisitions, a middle-market M&A firm, finalized the partnership merger with regulatory company Safety United. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Safety United focuses on providing OSHA approved safety and regulatory solutions to businesses that are not currently in compliance with approved standards.

The company was founded in 1987 by Edward Oliver, who was bought out in 2009 by his son, Josh Oliver. 

Reserve, a digital concierge service for the dining industry, acquired Dash, a mobile payment platform for bars and restaurants. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The Dash app itself will be discontinued, and the technology will eventually be integrated into Reserve. Founder Jeff McGregor and the product and engineering teams will transfer over to Reserve.

Founded in 2011, Dash had raised $6.9 million in funding from Caerus Ventures, Great Oaks Venture Capital, and Space Pirates, among others. 

The service was used by 250 restaurants across New York City; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; and Miami, as well as on 50 university campuses throughout the U.S.

Flipkart, the Indian e-commerce giant, acquired mobile payments company PhonePe. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

PhonePe will operate as an independent business unit within Flipkart. Founders Sameer Nigam and Rahul Chari are former FlipKart employees; Nigam, who was senior VP of engineering, left in July of last year, and Chari, who was VP of engineering, left in November.

PhonePe is building a product based on the new unified payments interface (UPI) of the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). It is slated to go live in April.

Video game developer Sega acquired Japanese video game developer, publisher and distribution company Atlus. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Despite Sega publishing Atlus's games, both entities will continue to identify as individual brands for future video games. The two companies have been working together for nearly a year under the Sega Games division, during which released a combined total of 23 game products.

Ivo Gerscovich will now be the chief head brand officer of Sonic and senior vice president of Sega of America. 

Morningstar, a provider of independent investment research, acquired RightPond, a provider of business intelligence data and analytics, from Rocaton Investment Advisors. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

RightPond will continue to be offered as a standalone capability until it is integrated into Morningstar Data and Morningstar DirectSM, the company's cloud-based investment analysis platform for institutions and advisors. Eventually, the company will rebrand RightPond under the Morningstar name.

Founded in 2012 as a benchmarking tool,t he company created a data extraction, normalization, and analytics platform and commercialized it in early 2014 as RightPond.

Zoom2u, an on-demand courier service, acquired Fetchh, an on-demand shipping, packaging and fulfilment platform. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Fetchh services will no longer be in operation, and the team has joined Zoom2u. 

Both companies are located in Austrailia.

SheKnows Media, a women's media company, acquired HelloFlo, a women’s health brand that offers advice, inspiration, and products for women and girls. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The acquisition is expected to close in April 2016. Until then, HelloFlo Founder Naama Bloom will continue to oversee the business. She officially joined SheKnows Media this month as Senior Vice President of Integrated Marketing, responsible for developing unique, innovative branded content offerings. Bloom will report to SheKnows Media President and Chief Revenue Officer, Samantha Skey.

Post-acquisition, HelloFlo will become SheKnows Media’s flagship women’s health platform. In addition, SheKnows Media will expand Learn From Her, HelloFlo’s e-learning platform created by women, for women.

Careem, a Dubai-based app-based car service, acquired Pakistani carpooling startup Savaree. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Going forward, Savaree's assets, including technology and intellectual property will be transferred to Careem. Madeeha Hassan, founder of Savaree, will join Careem as part of its global product team and will specifically lead product innovation for Pakistan.

The acquisition will allow Careem to enter Islamabad, where the app has spent some time building up its driver base, in order to take on Uber.

CenturyLink, a global communications, hosting, cloud and IT services company, acquired netAura, a security services firm that specializes in engineering, developing and consulting on managed security technologies. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The acquisition strengthens and enhances CenturyLink's managed security services available to business and government customers.

Founded in 2011, netAura has worked extensively with U.S. government agencies and corporations on cybersecurity, security information and event management (SIEM), analytics and vulnerability management.

Digital marketing agency Big Leap acquired digital marketing agency Leadgenix. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

Leadgenix’s president, Dan Posner is joining Big Leap as the Vice President of Business Development.

Combined, Big Leap now has around 40 employees and nearly 150 clients. Prominent clients include Domo, Extra Space Storage, Deseret News, Workfront, and BambooHR.

HotelPlanner, a source of online services to the global group hotel sales market, signed a definitive agreement to acquire Hotel Hotline, an online hotel reservations provider. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed. 

The purchase will better serve the needs of the company’s direct clients and market leading affiliates on a global scale.

HotelPlanner’s product growth line includes sister brand Meetings.com, ticket packaging, meeting space only bookings, and launched a new campaign with former Television News Journalist Dylan Ratigan. The company is also in the market to do more acquisitions.

Founded in 1999, Hotel Hotline has served over one million customers.

(Image source: cryptocoinsnews.com)