Private equity continues to expand its footprint in the Democratic technology space.
DSPolitical on Tuesday announced it’s been acquired by Optimad Media LLC, a Los Angeles-based marketing solutions provider that Orix Capital Partners holds a majority stake in. Terms for the deal weren’t disclosed.
On its website, the New York-based OCP says it targets “profitable and scalable businesses with promising organic and inorganic growth potential.”
The deal comes after EveryAction, the parent company of NGP VAN, was acquired earlier this year by private equity firm Apax Partners as part of a $2 billion deal that also included Social Solutions and CyberGrants.
Optimad Media works mainly with consumer packaged goods companies and the entertainment industry. Its purchase of DSPolitical also includes UNTU, a healthcare media, data and technology company that DSPolitical “helped launch,” but is a separate entity.
Mark Jablonowski, DSPolitical’s managing partner and chief technology officer, said the acquisition won’t change how the company does business.
“DSPolitical will still be focused 100 percent on supporting and electing Democratic candidates and causes across the country,” he said. “We will not be shifting our focus one bit.”
He added: “It’s not like there’s going to be an outside group managing or controlling or anything. We really are going to be getting the ability to work with industry peers, learn from them, get benefits of their technology, their operations, and really be able [to] double down on what we’re doing and hopefully move forward and have an even larger impact.”
Jablonowski said the deal started coming together in the second quarter of this year.
“An exit is not something that was on the road map, or the big goal, ” he said. “In our strategic planning sessions, we never were looking at, ‘how do we position ourselves for a transaction?,'” he said. “The right opportunity presented itself.”
DC-based DSPolitical currently has 35 employees and scales up to around 70 during a campaign cycle. Jablonowski, who joined DSPolitical in 2014 to help it transition from a services to a technology company, called the deal a “really good thing” for the Democratic technology ecosystem.
“We’re going to have more resources to have more impact every single day. That is the biggest thing,” he said. “We’re going to be investing in our solutions and our business and really making sure that the products and services that our clients have come to rely upon for the last decade continue, and get even better.”
Kevin Weisberg, co-founder and CEO of Optimad Media, said DSPolitical was an attractive acquisition target because of its “vast proprietary data segments and world-class analytics capabilities,” as well as its proprietary cloud-based technology platform.
“These investments fit perfectly with our strategic objective to enhance our core segment offerings while expanding into healthcare and public sector verticals, which we believe will benefit from particularly strong growth,” Weisberg said in a statement. “We expect to continue to be highly acquisitive and will be looking for additional M&A opportunities in order to penetrate additional end-markets, and further augment our technology and data capabilities.”
