Climb Advisors Weekly M&A Deals Newsletter

The Week in Review

Author

Nick @ Climb
November 19, 2023

Welcome to Climb Advisor’s weekly deal newsletter highlighting transactions announced last week across the B2B tech landscape.

Climb Advisors is an M&A advisory firm focused on B2B software and services companies in the range of $5m to $50m+ enterprise value. We guide CEOs and business owners through the process of selling their business & assist investors in sourcing & closing great deals. We love to talk markets and share beneficial information - please reach out any time.

Leading supply chain solutions provider Blue Yonder acquires Doddle

Overview: This acquisition will further bolster Blue Yonder’s logistics suite, particularly around consumer delivery and returns. Doddle, with just over 100 employees, works with retailers to provide a delivery solution that encourages shoppers to select post offices and other postal locations to collect their purchases. The platform also offers retailers a fully brandable returns portal, meaning their customers can check eligibility for returns and select items to return, whilst having access to a wider range of drop-off locations. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Last-mile is often the trickiest piece in a logistics equation and this acquisition gives Blue Yonder a powerful tool in solving the challenge. If you’ve ever returned an Amazon package to a Whole Foods, you know how much easier that process is than the old way of self-solving reverse logistics. Doddle, and now Blue Yonder, offer a similar level of seamless service to a range of private retailers along with other tools to help create a better customer experience and organizational savings on logistics spend.

Punchlist snapped up by Marketwate to make managing feedback easier

Overview: Marketwake is an Atlanta based digital marketing agency and they’ve just added a powerful tool to their armory with the addition of Punchlist’s no-code, feedback management solution. Fueled by a $2m seed investment in December 2021, their platform makes it easier to collect, share and organize feedback across different teams with a visual first approach that presents feedback in a manner that eliminates the need for complex spreadsheets and lengthy email chains. Read more here. 

Climb Comment: Interesting deal in a vein we’ve seen more of lately — services businesses, especially digital agencies, buying software tools. It makes sense as agencies have a broad customer base and deep insight to the needs of these customers. Being able to provide owned tools as part of a service package can be a huge value driver. Successful agencies also tend to have a strong sales motion and in-house marketing expertise that can lead to strong organic growth in an acquired platform. I believe we’ll see many more deals involving agencies buying martech startups at the seed or series A stage in the next 12-18 months.

Fusion92 continues on the M&A trail with acquisition of Trak Data

Overview: Marketing transformation partner Fusion92 has just announced its 4th deal in the last two years with the acquisition of Trak Data. The SaaS startup’s data modeling platform provides access to high performing audience lists which allows clients to identify ideal customer profiles. Their team of two will also join Fusion92’s data and analytics department as part of the deal, with other offerings provided by the acquirer including strategy, creative and media services. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Similar dynamic to the above — a consulting and digital marketing business acquiring a SaaS platform and dataset. Tons of value here for Fusion92 to be able to leverage the data in the platform (250m+ consumer profiles) and targeting capabilities to build effective campaigns for clients, and likely to pick up marketing and strategy engagements via some Trak customers.

Century Park Capital Partners backed MCCi acquires GovBuilt

Overview: Business automation solutions provider MCCi has strengthened its position in the GovTech sector with this latest acquisition. GovBuilt, which has a team of 15 employees, is a website platform used by local governments to streamline operations such as community development, licensing and permitting. Read more here.

Climb Comment: MCCi is focused on modernizing public and private sector organizations with solutions around automation, workflow process optimization, document management and processing, and a range of one-off and managed services. Govbuilt primarily sets up web-based workflows for local governments to offer online management and issuance of licensing, building permits, and more. Great strategic fit and a way for MCCi to move further into the stack of local governments and for GovBuilt to reach a wider base.

Hightouch announces a deal for AI startup HeadsUp

Overview: Fresh off raising $38m, Hightouch is acquiring HeadsUp to add to their customer data platform, which helps marketing teams pull data from warehouses such as CRMs and ad platforms. HeadsUp’s AI conversion engine will augment these capabilities as it compiles data models to locate tough to find customer conversion indicators and engage these promising leads. They have a team of 25 employees and their models can be easily deployed in existing workflows such as Slack and Salesforce, making them a powerful addition to Hightouch. Read more here.

Climb Comment: Hightouch delivers a platform that enables the syncing of enterprise data into all of the tools an organization uses to drive revenue. HeadsUp is focused on using AI to monitor customer usage data and predict sales opportunities. Combining the two creates a solution that can identify sales triggers in customer usage patterns and then drive that data out to a range of marketing levers. Great opportunity for Hightouch to acquire deeper functionality into a stack while also picking up talented engineers and other technological boons.

Thanks for following along & hope you found something useful or interesting. We’ll be back next week with more deals.

All the best,

Nick

Nick Cellura

Principal, Climb Advisors