‘Going to become a strategic acquirer of companies’: PE-backed MiQ gets on the acquisiton trail

Programmatic specialist MiQ has just bought an ad tech vendor. But it’s already on the lookout for more.

Private equity dollars tend to have that sort of effect. MiQ got a dose of it over the summer and wasted little time putting it to work when the company snapped up audience platform AirGrid earlier this month.

It’s a deal that’s very much of the moment, especially because any business that sits somewhere between an advertiser and a publisher like MiQ is at risk of being disintermediated as third-party addressability gets blunter. AirGrid — and others like it — help avoid that fallout because they help businesses plug that gap. They allow the likes of MiQ to monetize and scale the one, surefire alternative to increasingly ephemeral third-party data — publisher owned data.

But with the market in a state of flux, one deal isn’t going to solve all that ails any business. Where it can, MiQ seems intent to buy growth — quite the turn for a business that’s now worth around $900 million on the back of organic growth alone.

“The exciting thing for me is that I think MiQ is going to become a strategic acquirer of companies,” said Gurman Hundal, global executive chairman and co-founder of the business, who was speaking at an event hosted by investment First Party Capital earlier this week. “It’s great that we’ve got an organic growth strategy that can double or triple the business but imagine what we could do if we had really smart inorganic growth. That’s going to help us remain relevant for years to come.”

In other words, every downturn benefits someone. The last big one in 2008 that unraveled the ads businesses of the original online gatekeepers in Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL paved the way for Google and Facebook to cement their presence and in doing so fuelled the growth of the ad tech sector. Add it all up and it’s not hard to see why Hundal is positive about his own company’s prospects throughout this downturn.

“Whatever happens with the economy, programmatic ad spending will grow, certainly with TV dollars coming into the space,” said Hundal. “There’s a lot of headway in every market.”

Those headways are so big that he can’t countenance the idea of any market, or region or category within them, that is not being in growth for the business.

“One of the strategies we have here at MiQ is that everything grows,” said Hundal. “Every country, and every region within it, even every client segment in those locations must grow. The headroom in each one of them is too big for it to be anything but that. We’re going to try and keep on our organic growth plan but also we want to drive an inorganic growth strategy that complements that.”

Talk like this is almost a given considering who MiQ’s private equity backers are. It’s Bridgepoint, which specializes in middle market transactions (that is deals valued at up to $1 billion), with the publicly …read more

Source:: Digiday