Perion To Purchase Grow Mobile to Grow its Lightspeed Mobile Advertising Platform

Perion Network is snapping up Grow Mobile, a provider of mobile advertising that enables developers to buy, track, optimize, and scale user acquisition campaigns from a single dashboard. 

Grow Mobile will become part of Perion Lightspeed, which was recently created by Perion to address the advertising needs of mobile app developers, and will enable Perion Lightspeed to provide a more comprehensive technical and platform solution for app developers. 

Grow Mobile was founded less than two years ago and has managed advertising campaigns in excess of $20 million with triple digit year-over-year top-line growth in the last quarter. Grow Mobile will continue to operate as usual while migrating to become part of Perion Lightspeed.

Founded in 2000 and publicly listed in 2006 (NASDAQ: PERI), Perion is a 550-person consumer software and ad technology company with offices in Tel Aviv, San Francisco and Seattle.

Mr. Lyall, AJ Yeakel and Minglei Xu Grow Mobile co-founders, as well as the entire Grow Mobile team, will remain with the company. Mr. Lyall is the former Head of User Acquisition & Business Development at Storm8.  Mr. Yeakel is the former head of Mobile Marketing and Revenue at Zynga and Mr. Xu was Chief Architect and co-founder of mobile gaming company Wild Needle, prior to being sold to Zynga. 

The initial purchase price is $17 million, of which $10 million is cash and $7 million in equity which will be paid at closing. The total purchase price may reach up to $42 million, with an earn-out component that allows for an additional $25 million in cash and equity to be paid over the next 24 months, contingent upon achieving certain revenue and profit milestones.  

The transaction is expected to close early in the third quarter. The acquisition will be funded from cash on hand and management anticipates the acquisition to be accretive to Perion’s 2014 financial results.