Contact: Scott Denne
Singtel doubles the size of its ad-tech business with the $310m acquisition of Turn Inc, one of the earliest vendors serving the programmatic advertising market. Together, the two companies manage about $1bn in media spending. Today’s combination could help bring economies of scale to both businesses, an important and rare element of the low-margin ad-tech sector. For Amobee, Singtel’s ad-tech unit, the deal brings it a broader platform – Amobee is mostly a mobile ad player – and a footprint in the North American market.
The $310m price tag assigns Turn a multiple, according to our understanding of the target’s revenue, that’s roughly in line with the 2.5x trailing revenue that Adobe paid for video media platform TubeMogul. Turn is getting a market multiple in its sale, although one that comes in at less than half the post-money valuation of its last venture round in early 2014.
That earlier valuation came during a period of hyper-growth for Turn and the programmatic ad market. Its peers have similar private valuations and Turn won’t be the only one in the space to exit below its previous private funding. There’s an emerging cohort of buyers for these technologies (as we predicted earlier) as growth for many of the vendors has tapered off. TubeMogul, although public at the time of its sale, also exited below the high-water mark of its stock price that it reached in 2014.
LUMA Partners advised Turn on its sale. We’ll have a more detailed report on this transaction it tomorrow’s 451 Market Insight.
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