Crossboard Mobile, an ad-tech company with a focus on helping businesses find sales leads, has beed acquired by two different companies, according to CEO Steve Oriola.
Founded in 2008 as Pontiflex, the company rebranded as Crossboard Mobile midway through last year.
However, it’s been pretty quiet for the past few months, and I reached out to Oriola after receiving an anonymous tip that the company had sold off its assets and was shutting down. He confirmed the sale, adding that Crossboard was sold in two parts because it was “effectively in two businesses.”
There was the large brand advertising business, which was sold to Flatiron Media. And there was an ad platform aimed at small businesses (namely, the self-serve AdLeads platform for collecting mobile signups that I wrote about back in 2012) — that was sold to The Berry Company.
Oriola declined to share the acquisition terms, but he said both companies acquired Crossboard technology and team members. Asked about whether one deal was larger than the other, he said that the number of team members joining to each acquirer was “relatively similar.” (Oriola, who joined the company in 2013, will be moving on to a new, undisclosed project.)
“I think that the ad technology that we had built in our pursuit of the small business market was probably the more interesting of the two, with the possibility for greater scale,” he added.
Crossboard raised more than $15 million in funding (according to our most recent coverage) from investors including Atlantic Ventures, Greenhill SAVP, RRE Ventures, and Talus Holdings.
I reached out to both Flatiron Media and The Berry Group for comment earlier this week but they haven’t responded — I’ll update this post if they do.