Contact: Ben Kolada
The acquisition and reacquisition of MarketTools and its assets continued last week in what has been the most labyrinthine dealmaking we can recall. Since 2008, the survey creation SaaS vendor and its core assets have been through more than a half-dozen acquisitions, and there’s likely one more to go.
Founded in 1997, MarketTools made its first acquisition on record (we’ve been recording M&A since 2002) in 2008, when it bought customer and employee feedback management SaaS provider CustomerSat.
After that, however, the company began a long unwind. In December 2011, MarketTools was acquired by TPG Growth and simultaneously sold its Zoomerang, ZoomPanel and TrueSample assets to SurveyMonkey. Shortly thereafter, TPG unloaded MarketTools in July 2012 to MetrixLab, which then sold MarketTools’ CustomerSat assets to Confirmit. MetrixLab kept MarketTools alive, using the business to purchase RawData in July 2013.
The MarketTools assets sold to SurveyMonkey didn’t stay in one place for too long. Last month, SurveyMonkey sold ZoomPanel to Critical Mix, and last week it sold TrueSample to Five Peaks Capital Management.
Still with us? If you are, you’ll notice there is one legacy MarketTools asset that hasn’t yet found a third home: Zoomerang. If history is any precedent for the future, Zoomerang will likely be sold again soon enough.
Which way did they go?
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Source: The 451 M&A KnowledgeBase
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