Cross-device audience targeting company AdMobius is close to a sale, and a deal could close as early as next week, according to sources with knowledge of the company.
One of the suitors is Lotame, which has made an offer, but the transaction has not yet been consummated. There may be other buyers interested as well.
AdMobius was founded in September 2012 by executives from Apple’s iAd network, including CEO at the time Dan Grigorovici, a product executive at Quattro Wireless before Apple bought it in 2010. Since then, Grigorovici has stepped into a product role, and Peter Bassett has taken the CEO reins. The company has raised $5 million to date from Storm Ventures and Opus Capital.
AdMobius belongs to a class of cross-device targeting vendors that includes firms like Drawbridge, TapAd, Adelphic Mobile, and its sale suggests a path forward for these companies in the form of acquisitions by data management platforms (DMPs) — or other companies that providing marketing technologies. These platforms use a method of audience targeting often called “probabilistic” identification, designed to overcome the cookie limitations of the mobile channel by building detailed profiles linked to individual device characteristics.
“We are ingesting multiple different types of IDs, never the original UDID, never the original device ID,” Grigorovici told AdExchanger in 2012. “We index everything in our database in terms of our own AdMobius ID…. We essentially stitch together, if you will, multiple different non‑personal identifiable IDs.”
A Lotame/AdMobius tie-up would make some sense, since the companies are already partners. Last month, Lotame launched a mobile DMP suite with technology from AdMobius.
It’s been a very busy week for the DMP space more broadly. Monday’s acquisition of BlueKai by Oracle was a big moment both for one of the most established DMPs and for the “enterprise marketing stack” concept. Many eyes are on cloud marketing players such as Salesforce.com and IBM to see if they follow suit.
