private equity

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Tough Math MediaMath came to the end of its decade-long venture capital tether last year when it sold a stake to PE firm Searchlight Capital, wiping out the equity of its founders, early investors and employees. It’s a bitter outcome, reports Insider in […]

With cookies (finally) cooling off, contextual targeting tech is starting to heat up. On Tuesday, ShowHeroes Group, a video and contextual targeting tech provider based in Europe, announced its acquisition of cross-screen ad platform smartclip LATAM (as in Latin America). The rationale behind the deal is to help ShowHeroes Group bring its solution to the […]

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 […]

Brand Velocity Partners (BVP), a private equity firm founded in 2019, is creating a new business model as both a marketing services provider and as an owner of small brands. BVP’s first deal was in January for Original Footwear, which makes gear for police departments and military groups. Last week, it acquired Magma Products, a […]

Sizmek filed for bankruptcy Friday night, ending the private equity-backed effort to integrate Sizmek and Rocket Fuel into a cohesive buy-side tech stack, and possibly ending the Sizmek brand. Sizmek’s bankruptcy filing estimates its assets between $100 million and $500 million. Though its liabilities are in the same range. Sizmek’s four largest outstanding debts are […]

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Nielsen’s hire of IBM Watson honcho David Kenny as CEO, first reported on Tuesday by The Wall Street Journal, is a major bet for the measurement company as it rises to meet new competitive challenges and prepares for a possible sale of the business. Kenny oversaw IBM’s artificial intelligence initiatives, using machine learning to support enterprise […]

When Adobe acquired the B2B marketing company Marketo for $4.8 billion last week, investors pressed CEO Shantanu Narayen to explain the gulf between Adobe’s price tag and Wall Street’s valuation of Marketo two years ago, when Vista Equity Partners snapped it off the stock market for $1.8 billion. Private equity investors have shown they have […]

It seems everyone wants a piece of AppLovin. Private equity firm KKR bought a $400 million minority stake in the app marketing and discovery platform on Tuesday, lifting AppLovin’s valuation to around $2 billion from $1.4 billion just eight months ago. Bank of America Merrill Lynch advised AppLovin on the investment, adding a new wrinkle […]

MediaMath is flush with cash and ready to ignite consolidation in ad tech. Thanks to a $225 million investment by private equity firm Searchlight on Tuesday, MediaMath will end up with a $180 million cash infusion to spend on acquisitions and building new products. MediaMath, whose flagship product is a DSP/DMP, used $45 million of […]