Santa Monica Ad-Placing Company Seals Deal

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It’s been a busy few weeks for L.A. tech exits.

Closely following Apple Inc.’s confirmation that it plans to pay $3 billion for Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine’s Beats Electronics, and New York private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts’ reported $1.1 billion acquisition of El Segundo Web holding company Internet Brands, a few smaller deals have hit the wires in the realms of ad tech and e-commerce.

Mobile advertising company Amobee, a division of Singapore’s SingTel that operates out of Redwood City, bought Santa Monica’s Adconion Media Group for $209 million last week. SingTel at the same time announced the purchase of San Francisco marketing research company Kontera Technologies for $150 million.

Adconion places ads across display, video, mobile, email and social media from a unified platform. Its clients include more than 1,000 advertisers and agencies in the United States and Australia. The 9-year-old company had raised some $114 million from investors including Index Ventures and Wellington Partners.

“With Amobee, we can now offer our customers a complete suite of digital marketing solutions combined in a single platform,” Adconion President Kim Perell said in a statement.

Tool Time

CPO Commerce, a Pasadena online retailer specializing in power tools, has been acquired by United Stationers Supply Co. of Deerfield, Ill., for $30 million. The price tag could reach $40 million based on company performance.

United Stationers Supply, a wholesale distributor of business products, is a subsidiary of United Stationers, which is traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

CPO operates brand-specific sites where customers can shop for tools made by companies such as Bosch and DeWalt.

Founded in 2004, CPO employs 60 people at its Pasadena headquarters and another 55 at its distribution facility in Atlanta. CPO recorded $78 million in revenue last year and company founder and Chief Executive Rob Tolleson said its total this year would be “substantially bigger.”

“We’re growing at 25 percent plus a year,” he said.

United Stationers spokeswoman Diane Hund made clear that the two companies weren’t competitors. She said the company acquired CPO to gain access to a new customer base, as well as CPO’s digital capabilities as United Stationers transitions to an e-commerce model.

“We’re making progress on that, but we wanted to really fast forward it,” she said.

Tolleson said the buyout made sense for CPO because United Stationers’ 64 distribution centers across the country enable him to ship products faster and compete with e-commerce giants such as Amazon.com.

“That’s a huge resource for our company,” he explained.

Purchasing Power

Local companies have also been active on the buy side of the equation.

CheckAlt, a Los Angeles company that offers electronic deposit services for banks, bought machine-maker Diebold’s Eras division, which makes remote banking software. Terms were not disclosed.

And El Segundo cloud-storage provider Infrascale, which raised a $16.3 million Series B funding round, will use a portion of that money to acquire Eversync Solutions, a data protection company in Salt Lake City.

San Francisco venture capital firm Carrick Capital Partners led the round for Infrascale, joining existing angel investors Dan Gregerson and Randy Smerik. Carrick co-founder and Managing Director Marc McMorris will join Infrascale’s board.

Infrascale employs 107 people at its local headquarters. Eversync’s 18 staff will remain at its Utah office.

Infrascale’s cloud platform offers data backup, disaster recovery, archiving and file sharing services to businesses and individual consumers. It protects data stored on its servers with the same encryption protocol used by the U.S. military. The company also makes software that companies use to access its services.

Eversync focuses on protecting business data stored on physical devices.

Infrascale founder and Chief Executive Ken Shaw said the acquisition will allow his company to marry the two technologies and offer a “hybrid-cloud approach” that allows businesses to store and protect even more data.

The demand for cloud services is growing internationally as the number of remote and mobile workers increases.

“Five years ago, ‘cloud’ wasn’t part of the generic vocabulary,” Shaw noted. “That has changed.”

While you might not think of cloud computing companies in relation to Silicon Beach, the appeal of the cloud-storage market has been felt locally. In April, Red Hat of Raleigh, N.C., bought Los Angeles cloud storage software developer InkTank for $175 million.

Funding Roundup

Washio, a home delivery laundry and dry cleaning service, has received a $10.5 million Series A round led by Menlo Park venture capital firm Canaan Partners.

The Santa Monica company raised more than $2 million in seed funding in January from investors including Sherpa Ventures, Pejman Mar Ventures, Ashton Kutcher’s A Grade Investments and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang…. Santa Monica mobile advertising platform PaeDae also raised an $8 million Series B round from an unnamed “newly minted” venture capital firm. The company also changed its name to Mobile Majority and launched a new suite of products.

Staff reporter Omar Shamout can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 263.

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