In what is believed to be the most expensive acquisition of a private boot-strapped company, Intuit has confirmed that it will acquire Mailchimp for $12 billion. It will add the customer engagement platform to its portfolio of accounting and financial solutions — Turbo Tax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mint. Like those solutions, Mailchimp’s offering is primarily targeted at small and mid-sized businesses.
Mailchimp was founded in 2001 as an email platform but has gradually grown into an integrated automation and engagement solution. Last year, it launched Smart Platform, making AI-driven next-best-action and product recommendations available to its SMB market. Intuit currently serves about 100 million customers worldwide; Mailchimp has 13 million global customers.
Intuit expects to finance the acquisition through cash on hand and approximately $4.5 billion in new debt.
Why we care. Mailchimp played a shrewd long game, boot-strapping itself from an email solution with a cute name to a marketing platform with a significant international presence — a presence its acquisition by Intuit is likely to increase. Its avowed mission was to provide enterprise-level technology at prices SMBs can afford.
By adding Mailchimp to its existing roster of solutions, Intuit moves towards being a one-stop shop for SMB tech needs serving an enormous global market. $12 billion is a sizeable price tag, but less than half of what Salesforce paid for Slack in July of this year.
Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space.
He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020.
Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
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