December 2015
Fluent
Petsky Prunier advises Fluent on its sale to IDI at a valuation of approximately $225,000,000
December 9, 2015 (New York, NY) – Petsky Prunier is pleased to announce that it advised Fluent, Inc., a leading consumer marketing and advertising technology company, on its sale to IDI, Inc. (NYSE MKT: IDI), an information solutions provider for approximately $225 million. The transaction was funded with $100 million in cash and 15,000,000 shares of IDI common stock. Fluent will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of IDI.
New York City-based Fluent is a leader in people-based digital marketing and customer acquisition, serving more than 500 leading brands and direct marketers, experiencing 100% year-over-year revenue growth from 2014-2015. The combined entity is expected to be cash flow positive from day one, with Fluent posting approximately $126 million in revenue and approximately $20 million in EBITDA over trailing twelve months through Q3 2015.
Leveraging a massive reservoir of proprietary audience data, as well as millions of real-time survey interactions with consumers every day, Fluent enables advertisers to more effectively target and acquire its most valuable customers, with precision, at a massive scale. An early mover in the mobile trend, Fluent is well-positioned in the marketplace with more than 70% of consumer interactions occurring on mobile devices. In addition to real-time targeting and delivery of consumers to advertisers, Fluent has amassed significant owned data assets consisting of more than 100 million comprehensive profiles of U.S. consumers. Unique to Fluent, these assets include billions of self-reported consumer preferences and interests.
The acquisition of Fluent accelerates IDI's strategy to apply next-generation data fusion technology to the consumer marketing industry. The combined entity will employ more than 110 people with offices in New York, Seattle, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and Boca Raton. Ryan Schulke and Matthew Conlin, who serve as Fluent’s CEO and president, respectively, co-founded Fluent in 2010 and will remain in their executive roles. Ryan Schulke will join IDI’s Board of Directors.
IDI, Inc. is an information solutions provider focused on the multi-billion dollar data fusion market. IDI delivers otherwise unattainable insight into the ever-expanding universe of consumer- and business-centric data. Through proprietary linking technology, advanced systems architecture, and a massive data repository, IDI addresses the rapidly growing need for actionable intelligence to support the risk management industry, for purposes including due diligence, risk assessment, fraud detection and prevention, authentication and verification, and more. Additionally, IDI’s cross-functional core systems and processes are designed to deliver products and solutions to the marketing industry and to enable the public and private sectors to layer our solutions over their unique data sets, providing otherwise unattainable insight.
A team from Petsky Prunier, led by Sanjay Chadda and Dylan Kearns, served as exclusive financial advisor to Fluent.