The Nordic adtech company Adform is exploring a sale, four people familiar with its plans told Business Insider. A deal would mark the latest sign that the adtech M&A market is bouncing back after a couple of tepid years.
The four people said Adform had appointed Carnegie, a Swedish investment bank, to lead the process. They asked for anonymity to protect their business relationships; their identities are known to BI.
One of those people said Adform asked prospective buyers to submit their bids in April.
Adform and Carnegie declined to comment.
Founded in Denmark in 2002, Adform is one of the oldest independent adtech companies. Unlike many of its competitors, which tend to focus on either the advertiser side or publisher side of ad transactions, Adform offers solutions for both.
Those include a demand-side platform that helps advertisers buy and manage their ad campaigns across various media channels, data management platforms that help both advertisers and publishers organize their data, and ad servers where its clients can store their ads and track their campaigns.
Those assets could be attractive to other adtech companies, private equity firms, or the growing number of companies that have recently launched so-called retail media and commerce media businesses, such as supermarkets, e-commerce platforms, apps, and travel and leisure companies.
While it’s been around a long time, Adform has struggled to gain the kind of traction in the market enjoyed by its US rivals, such as Google and The Trade Desk.
Adform reported revenue of 88.6 million euros, around $97 million, in 2023, down 3.7% from the prior year, according to its most recently published annual report. The company said the decline reflected economic uncertainty that led to advertisers reducing their marketing spend. “EBITDA before special earnings,” its measure of profitability, came in at 16.9 million euros, or around $18.5 million. The company said it employed around 669 employees on average throughout 2023.
Adform had once planned to go public with hopes of raising $100 million, but it shelved its initial public offering in 2018, blaming the volatility in the financial markets at the time. The company has long been the subject of potential takeover rumors.
The adtech M&A market appears to be revving back into action after a quiet couple of years marred by ad spend slowdowns, economic volatility, and uncertainty around the impact of privacy and policy changes from the likes of Apple and Google.
Notable deals so far this year have included:
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