acquisitions
Founded in 2003, Lashback is a company offering marketing compliance tools specific to things like ensuring that affiliates and marketing partners respect unsubscribes and do not misuse data. It’s not a realm I know a ton about — I personally was more familiar Lashback’s “UBL” – Unsubscribe Blocking List or Blacklist, a DNSBL they once published to identify IPs sending mail to addresses known to have previously unsubscribed. Anyway, if, like me, you were wondering what has happened to Lashback lately — the answer is, they’re still out there, and they were just acquired by a company called PerformLine. Read more about that here, or head on over to Lashback’s website if you’re looking to learn more about what they do.
Privacy-first mailbox provider ProtonMail looks to be getting deeper into the email privacy game. Earlier this month they purchased a company called SimpleLogin, whose focus seems to be email aliasing and forwarding; sort of like Apple’s “Hide My Email” functionality. The goal seems to be to bring this functionality more natively into the ProtonMail experience. It’s good to have a competitor to Apple also seriously focused on privacy and tracking prevention, for those who want the functionality but don’t want to be part of the Apple universe. But that percentage of people who will be attracted to this, will they be enough to make ProtonMail a profit?
CM Group has announced a merger with email service provider/customer engagement platform Cheetah Digital (aka CheetahMail, once upon a time owned by Experian, later spun out standalone, with leadership and a lot of higher-level positions more recently filled by ex-ExactTarget and Salesforce folks). This would seem to bring Cheetah under common ownership with Campaign Monitor, Emma, Delivra, Sailthru and Selligent.This is very clearly being presented as a merger and I’m not seeing any information about a potential cost of acquisition. Usually these kind of things happen because private investors want to cash out — I’m assuming there’s something to that here, and I suspect we’ll see more on this in the tech industry press in the coming days. Stay tuned!Read the press release here.Pictured: The Guaranty Building in downtown Indianapolis, which was one of the first headquarters for ExactTarget, now Salesforce Marketing Cloud. If you look closely, you can see the “Cheetah…
While all the talk of what’s slick and hot and next seems to focus on adding AI to this and building the blockchain version of that, it still sounds to me like email is where the money is. Am I crazy to think that? And of course, multi-channel matters, but that means having a strong email service as one of those channels, no? I think Sinch would agree.Perhaps known to most as an SMS aggregator, Stockholm, Sweden-based Sinch has decided to dive headfirst into email, having, “signed a definitive deal to acquire Pathwire, the cloud-based email provider behind Mailgun, Mailjet and Email on Acid.” Read all about it over on TechCrunch.Pathwire only recently acquired Email on Acid back in June.
Well, Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius (who famously funded Mailchimp via their personal credit cards, telling me and others that they had taken no outside investment or debt) probably can now afford to buy everybody in Atlanta a burger at the Vortex (as they kindly did for for me once upon a time, years ago). From TechCruch: “Intuit confirmed persistent rumors that it was in the process of buying Mailchimp, detailing a $12 billion transaction that will bring the well-known email infra company to its corporate remit.” Find the press release here.