Intuit to buy email marketing platform Mailchimp in $12bn deal

14 Sep 2021

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Intuit said the Mailchimp acquisition will help it provide the services that small and medium businesses need to grow.

Financial software provider Intuit has announced that it will be acquiring Mailchimp for approximately $12bn, paid through cash and stock.

Mailchimp is a marketing platform for businesses. The company began in the US state of Atlanta in 2001 by offering email marketing and has since grown to help users promote their business through social media, ads and websites. It employs more than 1,200 staff across the world.

Intuit provides a variety of financial tech products to approximately 100m customers. These include TurboTax, a tax management and assistance platform, and QuickBooks, an accounting software service.

The California-headquartered software company said that it plans to focus on small and mid-market businesses through this acquisition, providing a host of services to these companies in one place.

“We’re focused on powering prosperity around the world for consumers and small businesses. Together, Mailchimp and QuickBooks will help solve small and mid-market businesses’ biggest barriers to growth, getting and retaining customers,” said Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit.

“Expanding our platform to be at the centre of small and mid-market business growth helps them overcome their most important financial challenges. Adding Mailchimp furthers our vision to provide an end-to-end customer growth platform to help our customers grow and run their businesses, putting the power of data in their hands to thrive.”

While Mailchimp started with email marketing and is still best known for this service, it has now expanded into other areas of marketing and uses AI-driven automation and provides analytics and data to users. It has 13m users globally and 800,000 paid customers.

Ben Chestnut, CEO and co-founder of Mailchimp, reassured its user base that disruption would be minimised through the acquisition process. “While our ownership will change once the transaction closes, which we expect to happen prior to the end of Intuit’s second quarter fiscal 2022, our platform will stay Mailchimp through and through: the same user-friendly products and tools, the same resources and support, and the same brand you know and love.

“In fact, our goal is for all of these things to get even better as part of Intuit,” he added. “We know that our customers and partners expect consistency and continuity as much as they expect new features and functionality, and we’re committed to meeting your needs as we move forward together with Intuit.”

Sam Cox was a journalist at Silicon Republic covering sci-tech news

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