Tag: United States

My local followers here in Minnesota may have heard about the acquisition of local startup SMB:LIVE this past week. The company was known more in these parts by the name of its service, CloudProfile, which had gotten some local buzz due to a test program it had going with Best Buy.  In fact, the day the acquisition was announced, the brand-new March issue of Twin Cities Business magazine landed on my desk, with a glowing piece on the company, under the headline Found in the Clouds.  So much for the timeliness of monthlies: just the day before, the company had ceased being an independent Minnesota firm, becoming part of a high-flying Southern California firm, which has filed for an IPO.

And I now have the details of what the acquirer — ReachLocal — paid for the firm. I simply asked my friends at socalTECH.com, a great site that covers the tech community out there, where ReachLocal is based. And, thanks to my prodding late yesterday 🙂 they took another look — proceeding to discover just the data I was looking for, which was in a filing they hadn't checked till they saw my email.

So, here's the deal: the purchase price was $2.8M in cash, plus up to $5.7M dependent on milestones — for a total of $8.8M, including assumptions of some liabilities. That's according to Ben Kuo, editor at socalTECH.com, who told me ReachLocal had buried the information in an S-1 addendum, and had not announced it in their earlier news release.

Not a bad payday for a firm that had barely released their site into the wild. Congrats to founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson. (Read more about him and his small team here.)  For more on the deal, see socalTECH's coverage that was updated last night.  And here's another site in SoCal with a page that groups socalTECH's previous stories on ReachLocal, including their filing for an IPO in late December.