Mailchimp, the digital marketing company which specialises in hosting email campaigns, has been sold off to US financial software giant Intuit in a cash-and-stock deal worth $12bn (£8.7bn), including $300m worth of restricted stock bonuses for Mailchimp staff.
Intuit, perhaps best known for its SME accounting program QuickBooks, expects to complete the transaction by the end of second-quarter of 2022.
The deal marks the software giant’s biggest ever acquisition; last year, it bought personal finance portal Credit Karma for $7.1bn (£5.1bn).
The scale of the acquisition puts Mailchimp’s value way ahead of Epsilon (bought by Publicis for $4.4bn (£3.4bn) in 2019) and Acxiom ( acquired by IPG $2.3bn (£1.7bn) in 2018, and propels it into the same league as Tableau (bought by Salesforce for $15.7bn (£12.4bn) in 2019).
Founded in 2001, Atlanta-based Mailchimp provides email marketing services to small businesses. Its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven technology stack has turned the business into one of the global leaders in providing customer engagement and marketing automation solutions.
The acquisition will help Intuit add insights to its QuickBooks platform that tracks spending, enabling it to provide an end-to-end customer growth platform to its clients and help them figure out how to better target their customers.
The deal is also expected to boost Intuit’s global presence. Mailchimp currently caters to more than 13 million users globally, of which 2.4 million are active users. It has around 800,000 paid customers, of which more than 50% are outside the US.
Mailchimp has a database of more than 70 billion contacts, as well as technology integration with more than 250 partners worldwide, which will allow Intuit to cross selling its other products.
Intuit chief executive Sasan Goodarzi said: “Together, Mailchimp and QuickBooks will help solve small- and mid-market businesses’ biggest barriers to growth, getting and retaining customers.
“Adding Mailchimp furthers our vision to provide an end-to-end customer growth platform to help our customers grow and run their businesses, putting the power of data in their hands to thrive.”
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