While it wasn’t a key part of my coverage area when I started this blog, these days I try to make it a regular habit of paying attention to Bend, Oregon. Because it seems more often than not, there are as many interesting startup stories coming out of Central Oregon as the metro region, as of late. Like this one: Bend’s Shape, an advertising management platform, has been acquired by digital marketing management company NinjaCat.
Over the last seven years, the team at Shape has been fixated on building pay-per-click management software that makes digital advertisers ruthlessly efficient in managing advertising spend at scale.
We’re proud to have helped digital agencies save their clients thousands (if not millions) of dollars in overspend by simplifying ad spend tracking. Our mission since day one has been to build budget automation solutions that give digital advertisers back valuable time they can focus on optimizing marketing performance.
We are fortunate to have found a partner in NinjaCat, a company which shares the same laser-like focus on improving digital marketers lives by automating marketing reporting.
“It’s never been more challenging for companies to effectively manage the sheer volume of marketing and advertising data businesses create, and bringing together data from disparate sources is the key,” said Chris Vlessis, CEO of Shape.io. “NinjaCat has a powerful vision and roadmap for delivering a tightly integrated platform that will enable our clients to report and act on their marketing campaigns with greater accuracy and efficiency than ever before. We’re extremely excited to be a part of it.”
Obviously, Delaware’s NinjaCat also sees the potential of the acquisition:
Along with bringing together two leading martech platforms that help our customers do their jobs better, faster, and smarter, I am most excited about the incredible humans that we are gaining to bolster our product, engineering and go-to-market teams. I can’t say enough about the remarkably talented people at Shape who share our values and know exactly what it means to build the type of company everyone wishes they worked for. I’m thrilled to welcome them to our team.
The technology, customers, and people we are gaining are a major accelerator to the NinjaCat mission to deliver an all-in-one platform to store, report, monitor, analyze, and act on marketing data at scale. I see this moment as one of many next steps in the continuing evolution of NinjaCat. Joining forces with Shape, we’ll be enhancing existing features within our platform such as new integrations and data connectors, while expanding our product portfolio.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. NinjaCat has raised $27 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
For more details, see the Shape acquisition FAQ.