Irish-founded Profitero snapped up by French ad giant for €200m

4 May 2022

Image: © OlekAdobe/Stock.adobe.com

Founded in Ireland in 2010, Profitero helps brands keep track of their performance on e-commerce sites such as Amazon and maximise sales.

Profitero, an Irish-founded e-commerce analytics company with a base in Dún Laoghaire, has been acquired by French advertising and PR firm Publicis Groupe in a €200m deal.

A global SaaS platform that helps brands optimise sales, Profitero’s analytics technology tracks more than 70m products across 700 retail websites, including Amazon. Its clients include L’Oreal, Johnson & Johnson and Siemens.

Profitero enables businesses to measure their market share growth performance against competitors and integrate online sales, share metrics and digital shelf analytics so that they can pinpoint the factors that lead to increased sales.

“Profitero’s products, technology and 300 employees will further scale and supercharge Publicis Groupe’s existing commerce capabilities around the world,” Publicis wrote in a statement announcing the acquisition.

The value of the deal was confirmed by the company to Reuters.

Headquartered in France and listed on Euronext Paris, Publicis is one of the world’s oldest communications companies, founded back in 1926. It is also one of the largest by revenue and traditionally considered one of the advertising world’s ‘big four’.

“Personally, I couldn’t be more excited about the future,” wrote Profitero CEO Bryan Wiener in an announcement of the deal. “This really is the best of both worlds. As a standalone unit, we will keep our entrepreneurial culture and leadership team intact.”

Wiener and his team will now report to Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun. “But now, we’ll have the capabilities and resources of a $13bn company in our corner to fuel the next stage of innovation for our clients,” Wiener added.

Profitero was founded in 2010 by Vol Pigrukh, Dmitry Vysotski and Kanstantsin Chernysh, who, according to the Business Post, moved to Ireland from Ukraine and Belarus to work for Google and IBM before founding the company.

In April 2020, Profitero made some changes to its senior management, with US-based Wiener replacing Pigrukh as CEO. It also raised $20m in a funding round led by Scaleworks with participation from Conviction Capital. It had previous backing from Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland.

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Vish Gain is a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com