Climb Advisors Weekly M&A Deals Newsletter

Climb Comment: One of the cleanest strategic fits we’ve seen on a large deal in quite some time. Real-time, pre-populated data that ‘lives’ inside a CRM is a huge boon to users. Many enterprise and mid-market sales & CX reps spend most of their workday interacting with Hubspot and the ability to keep those reps ‘in-platform’ for new sourcing activities provides a ton of customer value & product stickiness. Anecdotally, we’ve used many contact sourcing/customer intelligence tools in our work at Climb and have found Clearbit to be a standout in terms of both breadth of available contacts and data accuracy.

Climb Comment: Cutting-edge tech here from Dig Security. As we’ve discussed in past weeks, enterprises face a challenge right now -- they need to invest in new generative AI technologies and at the same time they need to protect the sensitive data that goes into these models. Dig provides visibility into where data is and how it’s being used & offers controls as to what’s allowed to leave & enter a secure enterprise environment. This is a great example of a ‘rails’ investment into a booming space -- as landscape changes occur there is tremendous value creation on the periphery of these technologies; providing solutions to problems that are either created or exacerbated by these new technologies. With PANW already having an extensive footprint & leading name in cybersecurity this acquisition will offer day-one value to customers.

Climb Comment: Bit outside our normal purview of SaaS & Services deals but worth highlighting. Content acquisitions have become a hot space as the ‘creator economy’ has grown, with deals like Insider.com buying Morning Brew for $75m in 2020 and Hubspot acquiring the Hustle for an undisclosed but presumably healthy sum in 2021. Fundamentally, groups like Futurum acquiring podcasts is not all that different from Warren Buffetf’s strategy of rolling up newspapers in the early 2010s or Katherine Graham doing the same (with Buffett advising) in the 1980s. It’s a matter of buying views, or in this case, listens -- acquiring attention.

Climb Comment: Great example of an acquisition that combines technical assets with customer verticalization. QBotica has built a strong reputation for ‘automation as a service’ across a range of industries and with the acquisition of Healthomation now has strengthened capabilities in healthcare, an industry that is highly specialized and difficult to access without a dedicated approach to the space. Healthcare billing softwares including RCM have been consolidated at a rapid clip in the last decade and it’s interesting to see a deal that takes place near the technical forefront of the space, with Healthomation offering AI based capabilities.

Climb Comment: Vivix was a subsidiary of Kantar, in turn a subsidiary of WPP, arguably the world’s largest advertising company. Appears that Kantar may be moving towards a more consultative approach to client work, focusing on brand positioning vs some of the more technical aspects which Vivix offers but it’s hard to say their exact rationale for divesting the business unit. On the other side of the table the rationale for MediaRadar to acquire is quite clear -- they were able to double their workforce & controlled media spend while adding complementary technical capabilities via the acquisition.