Zeta Interactive is best-known for its co-founder, former Apple CEO John Sculley. It's second-best-known for its email marketing technology and services.
Now, it's looking to expand even further beyond the latter than it already has, aiming to become a bigger rival to the likes of Oracle, Adobe, Salesforce, and IBM in the business of acquiring and keeping customers and getting them to spend more. To do that, it's acquiring the customer relationship management division of eBay's Enterprise operation.
The deal was originally to be announced Tuesday but leaked today as part of
The sale of eBay Enterprise in turn was part of eBay's split into several pieces in response to pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, the most prominent piece of which was its July spinoff of PayPal into a public company. EBay's enterprise business was built on the 2011 acquisition of e-commerce firm GSI Commerce for $2.4 billion.
Zeta funded the acquisition, which sources close to the companies said was about $80 million to $90 million, with $125 million raised in July from the Blackstone Group. That funding round valued the company at close to $1 billion, making it a so-called unicorn. The 8-year-old company, cofounded by Sculley and David Steinberg and formerly known as XL Marketing until a name change in January, has been focused mainly on email marketing, though in recent years it has expanded into broader offerings in the market known as customer lifecycle management.
The company already had a CRM offering, but eBay's amps up the capabilities to many more large clients. "For us, this is a game-changing deal," Steinberg said in an interview. "The eBay deal gets us a long way toward becoming the largest customer lifecycle management platform."
Steinberg said the deal will add 25% to 30% to its revenues, which were expected to hit $200 million this year, up more than 70% from last year. The combined company will have about 1,000 employees.
