If you frequent Portland coffee shops—well honestly, like some 90 establishments coffee or otherwise in the Portland area—you’ve no doubt come across Perka, the service designed to replace the loyalty punch cards in your wallet with something far more manageable: an app.
Well, First Data clearly noticed what Perka was doing. They recently acquired the partially Portland Perka for an estimated $30 million, according to TechCrunch.
While terms of the Perka deal were not disclosed, sources tell us that the acquisition price was slightly lower than what it had paid for Clover, which we have confirmed in a 10K filing (page 71) to be a net-cash consideration of $34.1 million.
Alan Chung, Perka’s co-founder and CEO, said that the startup’s 8 product developers and 28 total employees are still with the company and that Perka will continue to operate autonomously out of its Portland, Oregon and New York offices.
If the numbers are close, that puts the deal on par with the $26 million all cash Meridian acquisition by Aruba Networks. Given that Perka had similarly taken in about $1 million in funding, that would put it in the neighborhood of Meridian’s 25x multiple.
According to The Oregonian, the Portland office will remain intact. And if they follow suit with other recent acquisitions, I’m assuming they’ll continue to hire.
Perka has 19 employees in Portland, including a number of executives: chief operating officer Rob Coury, sales director John Whitted, chief marketing officer Rob Bethge, and operations director Alexander Wilmerding. Portland was also Perka’s first test market.
For more information on the deal, see the write-ups by All Things D and ZDNet or the First Data press release. For more on the company, visit Perka.
