Snap Inc. acquires Fund V portfolio co. Metamarkets

We’ve had a busy run of late on the portfolio M&A front.  Aquisio, RiskVision, and now San Francisco-based Metamarkets.

Metamarkets provides an AI-based big data SaaS platform, delivering an analytics dashboard for programmatic ad marketplaces at large and medium sized organizations. The company processes, stores, and reports buyer analytics on major ad exchanges, offering transparency and visualization into the performance of the ad exchange marketplace, while also providing buyers and publishers with login access to all of their purchasing/publishing data taking place on a Metamarkets exchange. The company services a broad range of customers as they analyze more than 100 billion events daily.

Founded in 2010 by CEO and Co-founder Mike Driscoll, the company has raised equity capital from such VCs as Khosla Ventures, IA Venture Strategies, DCVC Opportunity Fund, Village Ventures, True Ventures, and AOL Ventures.

TechCrunch published some interesting perspectives as to what Snap’s (SNAP:NYSE) strategy might be with this tie-up:

If Snap can provide better tools to marketers, it could lure them to spend more investment on Snapchat. And potentially Metamarkets provides more: it could represent an opportunity to Snap to present itself as an analytics dashboard across a number of other properties, not just its own. (Interestingly, this was some of the strategy behind Twitter’s acquisition of MoPub back in the day, too.) And it potentially opens the door to more collaboration between Metamarkets’ existing customers and Snap.

Congrats to Mike and his entire team.

MRM