Ad verification and measurement provider DoubleVerify is set to acquire Berlin-based ad tech company Meetrics, a deal that will help fuel the newly minted public company’s global expansion.
The all-cash purchase is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021. DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski declined to disclose the sale price.
Meetrics was founded in 2008 and provides ad verification solutions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and has global measurement partnerships with Google and Facebook.
Clients include major European media companies, such as ITV, G+J and Le Monde, that DoubleVerify had been looking to tap into in order to bolster its international growth. Other Meetrics clients include Carrefour, GM and L’Oréal.
Meetrics marks the first acquisition DoubleVerify has made since going public in July in one of the biggest ad tech IPOs in recent memory, valuing the company at more than $5 billion. Zagorski told AdExchanger at the time that DoubleVerify was eyeing “opportunistic M&A that can help accelerate our road map or help us grow globally.”
“We’re obviously using some of the proceeds of the IPO to drive growth,” he told AdExchanger Monday. “This is why we did that, so we can more rapidly scale in markets around the world and not have to wait to hire additional resources or build client relationships – we can actually go in and accelerate that using capital.”
The acquisition comes during a swarm of ad tech M&A, including DoubleVerify rival Integral Ad Science’s recent acquisition of sell-side CTV ad server and analytics company Publica for $220 million. Zagorski said other companies had been eyeing Meetrics.
“There’s been lots of M&A going on in the space, so there’s no lack of interest in any companies today,” he said. “[Meetrics] was a good fit for us.”
Meetrics has more than 80 customers across 23 countries in Europe. It partnered with InMobi last year and has raised a modest $1.3 million, according to Crunchbase. Other partners include The Trade Desk, Xandr and Adform.
DoubleVerify did not immediately respond to a question asking whether Meetrics was profitable.
Zagorski added that the acquisition will give DoubleVerify a competitive edge by adding Meetrics’s key assets, mainly its operating platform and sales, product and engineering teams, a total of about 40 employees who will continue to work overseas.
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The team will help DoubleVerify “bulk up its footprint” in the EMEA region and accelerate its business, particularly in India. Additionally, Meetrics has strong customer relationships in the German and Eastern European markets where DoubleVerify is “just getting its feet wet.”
In turn, Meetrics’s clients will have access to DoubleVerify’s full product suite.
“Not only do we add additional resources and technology, but it’s those client relationships where we can upsell our broader suite of tools, things like contextual targeting and authentic attention, all those new solutions that Meetrics doesn’t have we can now start bringing to their clients,” Zagorski said.
Meetrics will retain its name for a period of time going into 2022, he added, and will operate under the DoubleVerify umbrella.
DoubleVerify is coming off its first earnings report as a public company, in which it reported a 44% revenue increase in Q2 to $76.5 million, with much of that growth fueled by programmatic. The company also clinched new clients based overseas this year, including Diageo, BMW, Philip Morris International, Grupo Bimbo and Bumble.
Other recent DoubleVerify acquisitions include contextual intelligence platform Leiki and supply-side analytics platform Ad-Juster in 2019.
Meetrics was the first European company to receive Media Rating Council accreditation in 2015 for in-app viewability measurement for video and display. And in 2017, it received MRC accreditation for sophisticated invalid traffic detection across desktop and mobile.
The acquisition of Meetrics also comes as DoubleVerify is using its core assets to expand its platform from verifying the quality of media impressions to helping drive ad performance. The number of clients using DoubleVerify’s cookieless DV Custom Contextual tool, for example, more than doubled in Q2.
Accessing Meetrics’s technology will help DoubleVerify drive that transition from protection to performance.
Zagorski said that DoubleVerify has three areas of focus within its M&A strategy: global expansion, bolstering its existing product and technology suite and adding new products, such as new measurement and analytics solutions.
“This obviously hits that global expansion cube really nicely,” he said. “We’re going to pursue opportunities across all three of those areas. That’s where additional investments and opportunities to accelerate our CTV road map or road map into audio go.”
