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The acquisition is for up to $42 million, including milestone payments.
Israel’s Perion Networks Inc. (Nasdaq:PERI: TASE:PERI) has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire San Francisco-based Grow Mobile Inc. Grow Mobile provides an innovative platform for mobile advertising that enables developers to buy, track, optimize, and scale user acquisition campaigns from a single dashboard.
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Grow Mobile will become part of Perion Lightspeed, which was recently set up to address the advertising needs of mobile app developers, and will enable Perion Lightspeed to provide a more comprehensive technical and platform solution for app developers.
Grow Mobile was founded less than two years ago, and is already profitable. This past year, it managed advertising campaigns in excess of $20 million with triple digit year-over-year top-line growth in the last quarter.
The mobile advertising market is expected to see significant growth in the coming years, but remains a brand new market, highly fragmented and inefficient. An app developer seeking to advertise a mobile app today must connect to numerous traffic sources, each with its own stand-alone integration process, tracking systems, and dashboards. The developer also has to analyze data from each traffic source separately in order to optimize spend and increase reach. Perion Lightspeed and Grow Mobile together provide app developers a comprehensive solution to this problem.
“Acquiring Grow Mobile will accelerate Perion Lightspeed’s time to market, making the vision come to life faster and in a more robust offering, ” said Tomer Pascal, General Manager of Perion Lightspeed. “Adding Grow Mobile’s toolset to our development efforts positions Perion as a leader in mobile distribution platforms, giving app developers powerful and simple tools and access to real-time data and analytics tools, enabling them to thrive and succeed in the mobile space.”
The initial payment for the acquisition is $17 million, of which $10 million is in cash and $7 million in equity, which will be paid at closing. The total purchase price may reach up to $42 million, with an earn-out component that allows for an additional $25 million in cash and equity to be paid over the next 24 months, contingent upon achieving certain revenue and profit milestones.
The acquisition will be funded from cash on hand and management anticipates the acquisition to be accretive to Perion’s 2014 financial results.
