By Abigail Summerville
NEW YORK (Reuters) – LiveRamp Holdings, a software company which helps match up customer datasets for brands, advertisers and retailers, told Reuters on Wednesday it has agreed to acquire marketing data startup Habu for $200 million in cash and stock.
The deal will enable their clients – including notable names such as Walmart, PepsiCo and DISH Media – to share customer data more easily with their business partners, including advertisers and other stores.
“Habu is well known in the industry for building a really simple lightweight application layer that makes data even easier to use. We are going to ingest that and adopt it across our much larger client base and make things even easier for them to utilize,” LiveRamp CEO Scott Howe said in an interview.
Habu specializes in so-called “clean rooms”, which help content platforms keep user data private when interacting with advertisers.
“To really scale things, being able to plug (Habu) into a large company like LiveRamp will provide a lot more value to our customers,” Matt Kilmartin, CEO of Habu, told Reuters.
LiveRamp will pay approximately $170 million in cash and $30 million in LiveRamp stock for Habu. The deal is expected to be completed during the March quarter, LiveRamp said.
San Francisco-based LiveRamp expects Habu to deliver approximately $18 million in revenue in fiscal year 2025.
Evercore and Baker McKenzie advised LiveRamp on the transaction. Goldman Sachs and Gunderson Dettmer advised Habu.
(Reporting by Abigail Summerville in New York; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
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