Fresh off its $30 million funding round, digital marketing and affiliate solutions platform Impact Radius today announced that it has acquired New York-based Forensiq, a service that helps online advertisers combat ad fraud.
The two companies did not disclose the financial details of the transaction, but it’s worth noting that Forensiq, which was founded in 2010, never raised any outside funding.
As Forensiq founder and CEO David Sendroff told me, the company had grown to 45 employees over the last few years and was “punching above its weight” and competing with companies that had raised $50 million to $100 million. To continue on its path, the company would have had to either raise money at this point or look for an acquisition. Sendroff also told me that he believes that the future of fraud prevention products like Forensiq is in bundling them with integrated platforms upon which marketers and CMOs can run their entire business.
Impact Radius CEO Per Pettersen echoed this sentiment, too (unsurprisingly), and noted that there is currently very little overlap in technical capabilities between Impact Radius and Forensiq. Current Impact Radius customers include the likes of Lenovo, Ticketmaster, Shutterstock and Transferwise, who use the company’s services to track media channels, automate their tag management, and optimize and pay their direct partners.
The plan here is to take Forensiq’s tools, bring them in-house and use them to remove all non-human data points from Impact Radius’ analysis. It’s worth noting, though, that Forensiq’s brand and services are not going away anytime soon. Petterson argues that the Forensiq team built a strong brand over the years and that the two teams will spend some time to figure out the details what will happen to Forensiq’s standalone services.
The combined company will have about 275 employees and seven offices around the world.