Adtech firm Sonobi is pursuing a sale via investment banking firm BrightTower, according to three sources familiar with the deal.
The company, which is backed by private equity firm Cohere Capital, has been in the market since at least September last year and has $35 million in revenue and positive EBITDA, one source said. Bidders have made offers to Sonobi but a deal has not yet materialized, two other sources said.
The sources spoke to ADWEEK anonymously to discuss sensitive, ongoing financial negotiations. Their identities are known to ADWEEK.
Sonobi, Cohere and BrightTower did not return requests for comment.
Sonobi is primarily a supply-side platform (SSP) but also directly sells to brands and agencies. Mergers and acquisitions in the SSP space are heating up: Earlier this week, ADWEEK reported that 33Across is also pursuing a sale. Also this week, mobile sell-side-focused business Verve made greater inroads into the buy-side with its acquisition of Jun Group.
“You can see two strategics [come together] to create scale and get the footprint of the supply relationships that is not completely duplicative to try to scale up to get closer to a Google, Magnite, PubMatic or Index,” an adtech consultant told ADWEEK. “After the top two or three SSPs, there is a cliff where it falls off.”
Founded in 2011, Sonobi has been trying to diversify its stores of audience data with the looming death of the third-party cookie. The company acquired Amply Media in 2021 to gain access to the company’s first-party data and push notification technology. Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with Experian’s audience graph, framing the partnership as a way to increase addressability in a post-cookie era.
Cohere Capital invested in Sonobi in October 2020, buying out the company’s previous shareholders. At the time, the company’s profit was up 100% year-over-year, per the press release announcing the deal.
Earlier this month SSPs Beachfront and Sharethrough were acquired by Seedtag and Equativ, respectively. The logic underpinning the Equativ-Sharethrough deal was to compete with larger SSP players.
In 2023, following SSP EMX’s filing for bankruptcy and Yahoo closing its sell-side tech experts warned that there were too many undifferentiated SSPs.
