Climb Advisors Weekly M&A Deals Newsletter

Climb Comment: Interesting aspects here include the ‘chip race’, AI and open-source. Open-source companies like Nod.ai make their code freely available and monetize via features, support, and usage limits. Notable examples of open-source platforms include: Wordpress, Docker, & Red Hat (acquired by IBM for $34B in 2019)

In a field as rapidly evolving and technical as AI, specifically the infrastructure behind it, there is a definite benefit to leveraging involvement from the developer community. AMD certainly has the resources to support and scale those efforts.

Leading chipmaker Nvidia posted record profits last quarter by fulfilling the chip requirements of generative AI. AMD is prudent to acquire at the technical forefront of the space to stay competitive.

Climb Comment: TradePending is a dealer platform that largely focuses on ‘in-a-box’ solutions for dealer websites that aid conversions. These include tools such as payments and inventory calculators, features that make the buying process more interactive and help legacy dealers compete against the likes of Carvana with consumers who are used to a frictionless shopping experience. They have been acquisitive lately as they also acquired Snapcell - video software for dealerships - in August.

Fixed Ops focuses specifically on the services side of the dealership world, which generally makes up somewhere in the range of 50% of total revenue at a dealership. They offer solutions to:

- Run specials on particular parts or service offerings

- Manage OEM recalls

- Run Facebook ads natively

‘Done-for-you’ marketing around service offerings is an easy bolt-on sale to dealers and there’s no doubt that Fixed Ops brought in some new customer logos which TradePending will look to sell into.

Climb Comment: Specificity focuses on buyer targeting in marketing campaigns. In a world with ever-evolving privacy and data governance regulations, this is trickier than just the website pixels that previously worked. AImplify offers some cool tech that combines lead capture, machine learning, and automation to crawl both the open web and internal databases, identifying likely prospects, and reaching out to them on a regular basis using language that is likely to resonate.

There’s no reason for companies serious about sales to rely on their reps remembering to follow up with prospects - this can all be automated. AImplify is running these automations while integrating company & buyer-specific nuances. This will be a powerful tool in the stack of Specificity.

Climb Comment: Vitec, a Nordic serial acquirer with 38 business units & >$200m in revenue, has added another with the purchase of Dutch company Picturae.

Archival software has been attractive for serial acquirers due to the sticky nature - typically clients are museums, non-profits, & local government. Categorically, archival software tends to be classified similar to DAM (digital asset management) solutions. What can be tricky with these sorts of products is there are often extensive services associated - someone has to physically scan all these entries into the system & sometimes that falls on the solution provider.

Picturae highlights some interesting projects on their site around the digitization of herbarium collections - certainly a more complex use case than the simple scanning of documents. The digital fight against entropy continues!

Climb Comment: airSlate offers a full suite of workflow products centered around document management — including PDF editing as well as e-sign, form-builders & RPA to make working with documents more efficient. Instapage creates custom landing pages with a focus on enterprise customers and recently has moved into native AI content generation on these sites.

Instapage GM, Saranya Babu, says “As more and more businesses optimize their marketing technology stacks … the combination of Instapage’s product expertise and airSlate’s robust ecosystem will accelerate and expand the support for customers seeking to simplify key business processes through automation.”

Seems like rationale is two-fold here - add a strong product that serves a different side of the customer org & add generalist product expertise to positively impact culture and UX at the org level.