While 2022 might have been a hard year for many in the agency and tech sectors, investment in advertising across Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan remained positive, jumping by almost US$55 billion in 2022 – an overall increase of 12%.
Indonesian e-commerce firm Bukalapak announced that it has acquired a majority stake in iPrice, a Malaysia-based price comparison platform. Through this strategic investment, iPrice has the opportunity to accelerate its growth by leveraging the synergies between the two groups.
Mexican startup Pacto, a point-of-sale (POS) platform with integrated payments for restaurants and bars, announced a US$4 million seed round led by DILA Capital. The capital will be used to increase its engineering, product development, and customer service teams. With the new round, Pacto already has a total financing of US$6 million. It also has an alliance with Getnet Mexico.
CDP mParticle is being acquired by ecommerce platform Rokt for a price of $300 million. It’s the third acquisition of a leading independent CDP in a little over one month, following Uniphore’s purchase of ActionIQ and Contentstack’s purchase of Lytics. All three buyers offer some type of customer-facing technology; apparently they’ve decided that adding real-time profiles from CDP will give them a competitive edge. (See this blog post for more analysis.)