Tag: Acquisition

Singapore – Accenture Interactive, the digital agency arm of the professional services firm Accenture, has announced the acquisition of marketing consulting-meets-agency Entropia, to expand its unique position in the SEA market for experience-led transformation services, marking its first merge in the region. 

Accenture Interactive is a digital agency that drives sustainable growth by creating meaningful experiences by connecting human and business insights with the possibilities of technology.

Through the acquisition, Entropia will be complementing Accenture Interactive’s capabilities in customer experience, design, and creative communications. In addition, Entropia will help Accenture Interactive transform and reimagine its clients’ entire business through the lens of experience. It will also expand the creative talent pool within Accenture Interactive and create more learning and growth opportunities for people across both organizations.

Accenture Interactive’s Lead for SEA Thomas Mouritzen said, “Entropia’s addition will help us deliver innovation through technology to drive commerce and growth for our clients in Southeast Asia. It’s also an exciting chapter in our journey to strengthen and expand Accenture Interactive’s presence in the region.”

Meanwhile, Flaviano Faleiro, the president for growth markets at Accenture Interactive, commented that the acquisition of Entropia lets the arm lean further into their global vision to take experiences – designed through deep human insights and powered by creativity and technology – to the next level.

“It also helps us deliver on our growth ambitions for our people, clients, and the industry across the Asia Pacific region,” said Faleiro.

Entropia’s Founder and Senior Partner Prashant Kumar said, “This is the perfect time to join with Accenture Interactive and raise the bar in transforming data-driven marketing for businesses. I am thrilled to have both organizations come together and expand the canvas for our people, clients, and their customers.”

Singapore – SQREEM, a Singapore-based artificial intelligence company, has announced that it has acquired programmatic advertising platform Gamma SSP to augment the company’s plans to expand their services and clientele reach in Southeast Asia.

The acquisition entails that Gamma SSP will become a fully-owned subsidiary of SQREEM in the short term, with SSP eventually merging into SQREEM’s tech stack to unlock 97% of the world’s programmatic inventory and eventually expanding the offering to include digital out of home (DOOH) and connected TV (CTV) – forming a complete dynamic digital ecosystem. 

In addition, the acquisition will enable a global supply integration for SQREEM by combining its proprietary AI technology with Gamma’s integrations in the region and globally to bolster behavioral targeting solutions, at a landing page level, to brands and media agencies.

Gamma will still be led by its managing director, Matt Robinson, and the current management team. The combined entity plans to expand its headcount and geographical footprint by as much as 25% over the next year.

Ian Chapman-Banks, CEO of SQREEM Technologies explains that their AI technology allows them to convert online human behavior into anonymized data points to help out their clients reach the right people at the right place and time. 

“Gamma’s integrations will provide us a gateway to massively accelerate our access to any inventory around the world, and combining it with SQREEM’s AI will enable us to get even better and faster access towards delivering the first true cookie-free media buying platform. This will expand our offering as a one-stop solution that covers the entire gamut of programmatic advertising,” he said.

Founded in 2014, Gamma is a supply side platform (SSP) focused on representing Southeast Asian publishers, covering the key markets across the region. 

The company has already helped advertisers programmatically target audiences across an ecosystem of more than 1700 publishers, including major premium publishers in Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. Gamma also has the ability to support connected TV ad spots and will be adding DOOH in the next 6 months.

“SQREEM’s strong presence across APAC and their experience in working with brands globally makes it an ideal match to further develop our SSP and we are thrilled about becoming part of such an exciting company,” said Robinson.

He added, “I believe the technology we offer is hugely complementary and that together, we can utilise both the Gamma and SQREEM platforms to realise their full potential.”

Classified as a ‘behavioral pattern data aggregator’, SQREEM collects, analyses, and creates a database of open data on the Internet using its own AI technology. The Singapore-based tech company provides data analysis and precision targeting services to more than 100 companies and government agencies across various industries.

Stockholm, Sweden – Global software Bambuser, which primarily specializes in interactive live video streaming, has announced the acquisition of global martech company Relatable, as both companies are vying to use their combined resources to empower the future of live video shopping as well as influencer marketing campaigns.

The acquisition, valued at US$24m, will also help enable brands and retailers to scale high-impact livestream shopping implementations and drive business results.

Bambuser’s recent move follows after a year of remarkable growth for Bambuser and widespread adoption of the company’s SaaS solutions for interactive e-commerce. The two companies will operate and service customers independently, yet collaboratively. 

In line with the acquisition, Relatable founder Martin Garbarczyk will join Bambuser’s executive team as chief revenue officer (CRO), contributing his extensive experience building high-performing sales organizations to further accelerate Bambuser’s global growth.

“Bambuser and Relatable are a match made in heaven. I’m excited to build a global sales organization that leverages the enormous market demand and fuels growth to our SaaS business,” Garbarczyk said.

As a first step in the new relationship, Bambuser will add creative and strategic services from Relatable to its customers, enabling them to amplify campaigns before, during, and after Live Video Shopping events. Teams will be co-located in Sweden, the U.S. and U.K., where each company has an established presence, to enhance synergies and drive opportunities for cross- and upselling.

“By joining forces with Relatable, we increase our market pole position with an unrivaled SaaS offering that clearly differentiates us from the competition,” said Maryam Ghahremani, CEO of Bambuser.

Sydney, Australia – Comparison platform Finder has acquired the financial content platform GoBear in order to drive its growth and presence in the Southeast Asia region.

It should be recalled that GoBear had announced last January this year that they will be ceasing operations due to constraints in funding to continue operating.

“Both Finder and GoBear believe in the importance of improving people’s financial health. We are happy to see that the GoBear brand will continue to live on and it will be exciting to see where Finder will bring it next,” said Jinnee Lim, chief strategy officer at GoBear.

Through the acquisition, GoBear’s trademark and digital assets including domains, website content and social channels in seven markets: Singapore, Hong Kong SAR, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia will be acquired. The GoBear brand will continue to operate via social media and email channels, however the website content will now form part of finder.com and its local services. 

Finder, which is founded by Frank Restuccia, Fred Schebesta and Jeremy Cabral, envisions that through the acquisition, they hope to serve 438 million unbanked consumers in the region, as there is a significant opportunity for growth as digital financial services is set to grow to a $60 billion industry by 2025, according to Bain and Company.

“Like Finder, GoBear has been committed to improving the financial wellbeing of its audience, with over 55 million people having visited its website since its launch in 2015 to make better-informed decisions. Finder’s mission is to help people all over the world make better financial decisions and we’re excited to ramp up our offering to the region through a recognised brand like GoBear,” Restuccia stated.

He added, “We see Finder as playing an important role in the financial ecosystem to help Asian consumers make decisions that are right for them when it comes to financial products and services.”

Melbourne, Australia – Consumer brand Kogan.com has recently acquired Mighty Ape, a New Zealand-based online retailer, which signals a much larger retail business growth across ANZ via new customer offerings and renewed business structure.

The complementary acquisition provides Kogan.com an immediate access scale of the New Zealand market, to which Mighty Ape has built its own business presence in New Zealand. 

For David Shafer, Kogan.com’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, the recent acquisition speaks to the shared history and values they have with Mighty Ape, noting the business track of the New Zealand online retailer to many customers.

“Mighty Ape will give us significant scale in New Zealand and further strength across a variety of operational dimensions. We will be drawing on Mighty Ape’s deep experience in gaming, toys, other entertainment product categories, and the New Zealand market, and combining this experience with Kogan.com’s sourcing, technology, systems, infrastructure, and marketplace capabilities, to further enhance the group’s already market-leading offering across the Tasman,” Shafer stated, also noting that “they will look forward to serving and delighting customers throughout New Zealand and Australia”

On the other hand, Mighty Ape Founder and CEO Simon Barton said, “The Mighty Ape team is very happy to be joining forces with the Kogan.com Group, as we embark on the next stage of our growth. Combining with Kogan.com will assist Mighty Ape to expand our product range and improve our customer experience. I am excited about working with Ruslan and David, and the broader Kogan.com team — who have built an incredible business — while also aligning and creating more growth opportunities for the incredible team that helped build Mighty Ape to be New Zealand’s most trusted retailer brand.”

California, USA – Customer experience platform SugarCRM has recently announced the acquisition of Loaded Technologies,  a business consulting, CRM strategy and cloud implementation services provider based in Sydney, Australia.

With this acquisition, SugarCRM is expanding its ability to meet implementation service demand in Australia and the broader Asia-Pacific region. SugarCRM’s service portfolio includes cloud-based customer experience solutions, AI-powered sales, and other marketing/service software.

Such services then enable high-definition customer experience through implementations such as migrations from on-premise to cloud environments.

“We are excited to have the team at Loaded Technologies, with their dedication to customer success and  expertise of the Sugar CX solutions. The acquisition of our long-time partner, addresses a growing need for mid-market companies who want a trusted advisor that can help them navigate and succeed in optimizing and differentiating their customer experience,” said Jason du Preez, general manager for SugarCRM Asia Pacific.

India – Deloitte India has announced that it has acquired advertising and marketing advisory and analytics firm, Spatial Access to enhance the organization’s advisory capabilities on its digital marketing and customer services.

The company said that the move was aimed at leveraging the firm’s  knowledge-driven sector expertise. Deloitte believes that this will help their brand marketer clients gain deeper insights on consumers and advertising avenues, and in turn, better position their marketing spends. 

Chandrashekar Mantha, media and entertainment industry lead and partner at Deloitte said, “Our endeavor is to help brands address their business challenges by introducing value added, and differentiated tech-enabled solutions across the A&M value chain.”