We have a tasty mix of investment news today, Dear Reader. First is pricing of marketing tech, data, and services vendor (and CDP) Zeta Global’s previously-announced IPO, which proposes to raise $250 million for a market cap of $2 billion or so. It’s a fairly modest 5x revenue, which will be around $400 million.
Here’s an effort to save by the planet by discarding old emails, which are wasting resources by taking up storage space. The idea is to put an expiration date on commercial emails, since few people will ever look at them more than a few days after they’re sent. I’m pretty sure they’re serious, although it might be a subtle joke.
Tech publisher IDG is being sold by investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings to a private equity investor Blackstone for $1.3 billion. IDG owns tech analyst firm IDC plus publications including CIO, Computerworld, and Tech Hive. It’s a fire-sale price: not much more than China Oceanwide reportedly paid for IDG in 2017 and fraction of IDG’s revenues, which are I’d guess are between $3 billion and $5 billion.
GrowthLoop will use TransUnion identity data to improve U.S. consumer match rates on client files sent to advertising media such as Facebook and Google Ads. The data should also help clients to find matches among records within their files, building more accurate customer profiles. GrowthLoop calls itself a “composable CDP”, meaning it works with data assembled in external data warehouses.