Public data company LiveRamp has agreed to acquire five-year-old startup Habu in a cash and stock deal valued at $200 million.
LiveRamp helps companies including Kimberly-Clark and Danone use data to target ads across the web and TV. It also helps marketers use their own first-party data for targeting without third-party cookies.
Habu’s software sets up so-called data clean rooms that lets two or more companies share data to see if they have any overlap with their customers. Clean rooms are designed to be privacy-safe environments that restrict what data can be accessed and by whom.
Habu can also help marketers measure how their campaigns performed, said Habu CEO Matt Kilmartin. This function is increasingly important as Google has begun killing off third-party cookies in Chrome, which were traditionally used to measure ads.
Habu’s clients include Asics and PepsiCo, and the company has raised a total of $42 million from investors including Wing Venture Capital and Snowflake Ventures.
LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe said the deal will help LiveRamp scale and grow partnerships with the cloud companies and platforms that Habu works with — like Google, Meta, and Disney.
Collaborating with other data partners can be difficult and time-consuming. LiveRamp’s clients have been asking for ways to do this using fewer tools, Howe said.
“They built a really intuitive, lightweight application, and clients can get up and running with them in very little time,” he said. “Our intent is to ingest a lot of their technology and make it our interface for how clients can get started.”
While the two companies share some clients, Howe said, LiveRamp tends to work with larger enterprises.
Habu will help LiveRamp expand its base of small and midsize clients.
“In many cases, if you’re building a category or if you’re expanding new industries, sophistication is the enemy,” Howe said. “You need to have simplicity, you need to have quick wins, develop quick case studies, and I think this is going to give us an opportunity to do that.”
Habu’s capabilities extend beyond marketing, and its clients use its technology to support applications around supply-chain data, healthcare data, and financial services data. Howe said these use cases could help LiveRamp expand its business beyond marketing to help companies manage data more broadly.
Habu’s 50 employees will join LiveRamp and report to Chief Revenue Officer Vihan Sharma.
LiveRamp disclosed its third-quarter fiscal year revenue ahead of its earnings on February 8. LiveRamp reported $174 million in revenue during the quarter, up 10% year-over-year.
Read the full article here