RNTS, the German parent company of Fyber (formerly known as SponsorPay) and Heyzap, continues its run of ad tech acquisitions. Today the company announced that it has acquired Inneractive, an Israeli-based real-time bidding and mobile ad exchange, for $46 million in cash, plus up to $26 million in earn-outs and retention payments, with the deal expected to complete in Q2.
This is a good exit for Inneractive. Co-founded in 2007 by Ziv Elul and Offer Yehudai, the startup had raised only $11.5 million in funding in that time, with backers including Kreos and Evergreen Venture Partners. Inneractive said it had revenues of $43.2 million in 2015 and was profitable, and projects to double revenues in the next two years.
The news comes about two months after RNTS announced that it had closed its $45 million Heyzap acquisition, as well as another acquisition of Falk Realtime for $11 million in 2015.
More generally, we have seen a lot of ad tech consolidation in the last couple of years, with a number of smaller startups coming under the under the wing of larger platforms, and big fish getting gobbled up by even bigger fish. It will be interesting to see whether years like 2014 and 2015 — which saw a lot of activity and huge acquisitions like Verizon buy our owner AOL for $4 billion; and Twitter buy TellApart for $479 million — were a high water mark, or whether there are more huge deals to come.
RNTS says that the new assets will make it one of the largest independent mobile supply-side platforms, with its services covering mediation, exchange and ad service across mobile, web and other platforms. Others that compete on supply-side platforms include Google and Doubleclick; OpenX and AOL/Verizon (owner of TechCrunch).
In the ad game, scale is of prime importance to help in areas like adding more liquidity to the wider platform and optimizing pricing revenue per unique user; and this deal will help RNTS have more scale. Inneractive said it had a user reach of 630 million monthly active users in 180 countries, while Fyber claimed over 500 million, helping the wider company now reach over 1 billion MAUs globally.
“This is another milestone for RNTS on our path to building the leading supply-side platform for the mobile app economy. By playing an active role in industry consolidation we intend to secure a lasting competitive edge,” said Andreas Bodczek, CEO of RNTS Media. He projects a 2016 run rate of $200 million.
RNTS says other benefits of the deal will be to add more verticals beyond publishers to include entertainment, productivity, news, messaging, social networking and utilities, particularly across mobile apps.
Inneractive will be run largely independently within RNTS Media, the company said.
“This is a great achievement for Inneractive and we are very proud of our amazing team,” said Ziv Elul, co-founder and CEO of Inneractive. in a statement. “We have been working with Fyber and its strong executive team for a long time and are excited to join the RNTS family. We are passionate about the potential of our future together, excited about the synergies and confident in our ability to work together to offer publishers the most comprehensive tech stack in the industry.”