Indian performance marketing firm Affle is acquiring Perion, an adtech firm focused on connected TV (CTV), digital out-of-home (DOOH), and retail media for $420 million.
The all-cash deal value comes out to $11.70 per share, a premium of 34.5% on Perion’s Oct. 30 closing price.
Affle has traditionally used AI to help advertisers improve targeting, engagement, and sales. The companies say the deal will help deliver a more unified, full-funnel approach, bringing together Affle’s lower-funnel mobile performance marketing business and Perion’s focus on attracting upper-funnel brand dollars across CTV, retail media, and DOOH.
Together, the capabilities could support “CTV-to-cart” and “DOOH-to-cart” outcomes for advertisers, Affle hopes.
The mashup, per a statement from Affle CEO, chair, and managing director Anuj Khanna Sohum, could “unlock greater ROI for advertisers and publishers alike, while driving global scale for premium consumer conversions across industry verticals such as e-commerce, retail, and healthcare.” It will also bolster Affle’s cost-per-converted-user mobile business in developed markets and support its goal of 10x-ing its growth in a decade, Sohum said.
With Perion’s capabilities folded in, Affle will now have “a way to both expand geographically to become global, and to garner upper-funnel capabilities in out-of-home, CTV, and commerce media,” said Terence Kawaja, founder and CEO of investment bank Luma Partners, which served as the sole financial advisor to Affle on the deal. “If you have an excellent conversion technology capability, then apply that to upper-funnel agency-led advertising solutions, you can basically turn those into outcomes,” he said.
The pairing will “create new opportunities for brands, agencies, and media owners worldwide,” Tal Jacobson, Perion CEO, added in a statement.
But the price tag was also relatively cheap considering it’s about a fraction of what Perion used to be worth, and Perion’s on-hand cash offsets about half the cost. Excluding the roughly $228 million in cash and investments on Perion’s balance sheet as of Sept. 30, Affle is effectively paying about $192 million for the operating business. That’s roughly 3.7x the $51 million to $53 million in adjusted EBITDA that Perion has projected for this year.
Neither Affle nor Perion responded to requests for comment on the deal value.
The agreement adds to a wider pattern of open-web consolidation following a succession of mergers and acquisitions this year: In May Publicis spent $2.5 billion on LiveRamp; Nielsen agreed to pay $2.15 billion to take DoubleVerify private in August; Stagwell’s acquired publisher adtech platform Freestar last week; Private equity firms Vista Equity Partners and Quinti Capital are also reportedly making a bid for Criteo.
Budgets keep moving to walled gardens, retail media, and CTV. Recent findings from the World Advertising Research Center indicate that Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta will capture almost 60% of global ad spend outside China this year. Perion historically bought into those channels, but faces intense competition in those arenas from bigger players like Amazon, which gobbled up over 75% of U.S. retail media spend last year, per Emarketer.
Perion’s own CEO said in August that the company was built around “diversifying away from the open web,” and its web channel was the primary drag on revenue in the second quarter. Historically dependent on the open web and search syndication (thanks to a long-standing partnership with Microsoft Bing), and punished by public markets in recent years—even after a nearly $193 million cumulative stock repurchasing push through Sept. 30—Perion matches the profile for the kind of culling playing out across the market. Before the Affle deal was announced, Perion’s stock was down about 79% from its five-year high of nearly $42 in April 2023.
That’s not to say Perion didn’t try to spread its eggs across different baskets first. The company made a handful of acquisitions in recent years, including video adtech platform Vidazoo in 2021 ($93.5 million), DOOH player Hivestack in 2023 ($100 million), AI-powered media buying firm Greenbids in 2025 (up to $65 million), and Premier Retail Networks in August of this year (up to $12 million).
Luma Partners’ Kawaja acknowledged that the low price was “icing on the cake” for selling Perion on the deal. Affle, he said, “looked at a number of different potential targets, and they’re all trading fairly cheaply.” So the pricing, he said, “was just opportunistic.”
But he insisted the Perion takeover is more strategic than financial in nature, and said the pricing “didn’t drive” the decision. “These are not financial guys that said, ‘Hey, look, it’s trading low. We buy it.’ It’s a strategic rationale for the expansion [of the business] that fits the industry trends of moving towards outcomes and a collapse of the purchase funnel,” he said. “It just makes it that much easier and better if you don’t have to bet the ranch and pay a huge multiple.”
Under the terms of the arrangement, expected to close next year, Perion, which has traded on the Nasdaq since 2006, will become a subsidiary of Affle’s Israeli operation Affle 3iL Ltd, and will come off the exchange and the Tel Aviv exchange, where it also traded. The combined company will still trade on the public National Stock Exchange of India.
The acquisition is backed by debt financing from Citibank, and will require shareholder and U.S. antitrust approval. Terms also include a 40-day ‘go-shop’ period during which Perion can solicit rival offers.
Perion shares were up 31% Monday, to around $11.42, following the announcement.
