Late last year, with the end of the pandemic hopefully in sight, Luma was beginning to see investor confidence return.
If anything, that cautious optimism was understated, as this Spring, Luma saw the best quarter in deals that it had ever seen.
This week on The Big Story, we welcome back Conor McKenna, Luma director (not VP, as we misstated in the podcast), to talk about the wild influx of early 2021 deal making that saw seven transactions of more than $1 billion.
Even Luma, despite its optimism, was taken aback.
“Frankly, the seven transactions that happened – and two were for IPOs that were filed and aren’t out – that was surprising,” McKenna says. “You talk about unicorns in ad tech, we’ve had as many in Q1 as we’ve had in the last ten years. And it’s driven by a lot of things lining up.”
In this episode, we’ll delve into the macro, industry and market trends that created the “perfect storm” for ad tech valuations.
But to what extent is all this sustainable? And will the influx of freshly-minted public ad tech companies make ad tech the new strategic acquirers of ad tech? (A prophesy that’s already born out with Magnite using its soaring stock price to fund its SpotX acquisition).
Most importantly: Do Luma executives get veto power over Terry Kawaja’s costume decisions?
