Inuvo, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) technology for brands and agencies, announced its acquisition by ConversionPoint Technologies, a privately held e-commerce technology company.
The acquisition will be a cash-and-stock transaction valued at approximately $2.22 per share of Inuvo, based on 34,077,624 common shares outstanding and restricted stock units that will immediately vest upon closing. Inuvo shareholders will receive $0.45 per share in cash and stock valued at an estimated $1.77 per share, or approximately $75.5 million in total consideration.
ConversionPoint is acquiring Inuvo for its patented, AI-driven consumer behavior technology, that uses machine learning to mimic the human brain and its interpretation of ideas, emotions, places, people and objects. This platform is expected to create a competitive e-commerce solution for major non-Amazon channels, such as Shopify, Big Commerce, and Walmart.com.
“Amazon controls nearly half of the $450 million in online retail sales in the U.S. thanks to their proprietary data-driven approach to consumer analysis and marketing,“ explained ConversionPoint CEO, Robert Tallack. “Online retailers and brands have been searching for an end-to-end data-driven technology to help provide accurate information they can use to acquire customers. We believe that together with our end-to-end, AI-powered, e-commerce platform can offer those capabilities to the online retail channel and the direct channel that the market has been actively searching for.”
The CEO of Inuvo, Rich Howe said, “With our combined technologies, data sources and industry partners, we will be able to offer an even greater level of e-commerce transparency and sophistication across small, medium and large business segments. We see this combination allowing us to pursue a shared vision of providing more powerful solutions for e-commerce.”
“Inuvo’s technology and product offerings make our combination very attractive in terms of immediate cross-selling opportunities,’ said ConversionPoint CFO, Raghu Kilambi. “The scale of the combined operations coupled with the identified synergies focused on the e-commerce market is anticipated to provide attractive upside revenue and margin expansion opportunities as well as a unique capital market story.”
Trey Barrett, COO of Inuvo said, “We have identified a number of specific near-term opportunities, including upselling Inuvo’s high-margin AI-powered IntentKey media to ConversionPoint’s existing enterprise customers and online retail partners. We also expect to reap significant benefits from integrating ConversionPoint’s retail brands into Inuvo’s ValidClick platform, creating a new traffic acquisition source for ConversionPoint clients, and utilizing ValidClick’s advertising inventory throughout our customer experience.”
