Indaco sells AdmantX to Vista Equity-backed IAS

The deal gives the company an enterprise value of €16m.

In addition to Indaco's 18.43% stake, IAS also acquired the shares held by the company's management and the 60.8% stake owned by Milan-listed Expert System, also backed by Indaco.

Following the deal, AdmantX will be integrated within the new group and the brand will be absorbed under IAS.

Indaco held its stake in AdmantX via its vehicle Fondo Atlante Ventures Mezzogiorno, which targets technology companies primarily based in southern Italy and is backed by Intesa Sanpaolo and the Italian ministry for public administration and innovation.

In addition to this vehicle, the firm also manages Indaco Venture I, which was launched in May 2018 with a €200m target and has raised €130m so far, as well as Atlante Seed, Atlante Ventures, and TTVenture. Indaco's LP base includes Intesa Sanpaolo, Fondazione Cariplo and Fondo Italiano d'Investimento (FII).

Fondo Atlante Ventures Mezzogiorno invested around €2m in AdmantX in 2011 in exchange for a 21.2% stake. Subsequently, it reduced its ownership to 18.1% in 2015, while Expert System, which previously held 69.4%, decreased its stake to 60.8%.

IAS is headquartered in New York with 22 offices in 13 countries worldwide. Vista Equity Partners acquired a majority stake in the business in June 2018 via its $11bn Fund VI.

With this add-on, IAS expects to bolster its technological suite, boost its growth, expand in new geographies and further improve its relationships with brands and publishers worldwide.

Company
Established as a spinout from Indaco-backed Expert System in 2010, AdmantX is a provider of natural language processing (NLP) semantic-based solutions for contextual advertising, advanced brand safety and audience profiling. The company allows advertisers and publishers to match ads to relevant content at a granular page level, ensuring personalised brand safety. It also uses its interest profiling and AI modelling layer to create detailed first-party consumer profiles so that campaigns can be tailored for maximum impact.

AdmantX's client base includes the Financial Times, Sky, NBC Universal, Ikea, Thompson Reuters, Experian, Manzoni, Dentsu Aegis, TIM, Amnet, Simple Agency, Accuen, RCS Group, Mondadori and Ogilvy. The company is headquartered in Italy and has a market presence in eastern Europe, the UK, Scandinavia, Asia, the US and Latin America. Its systems are available in 29 languages and supported by teams based in Italy, the UK and the US. It generated revenues of around €2m in 2018.

People
Indaco – Alvise Bonivento (co-founder, partner).
AdmantX – Giovanni Strocchi (CEO).
Integral Ad Science – Lisa Utzschneider (CEO).

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