Jordan Bevan
Intuit, known for its financial services offerings such as TurboTax and Credit Karma, has announced that it will acquire digital marketing company Mailchimp for approximately $12 billion in a cash and stock deal, marking it as Intuit’s largest deal to date.
The company said it will use the acquisition to accelerate growth among its small business customers. The Mailchimp deal will also help Intuit add insights to its Quickbooks platform that tracks spending.
“We’re focused on powering prosperity around the world for consumers and small businesses. Together, Mailchimp and QuickBooks will help solve small and mid-market businesses’ biggest barriers to growth, getting and retaining customers,” said Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit. “Expanding our platform to be at the center of small and mid-market business growth helps them overcome their most important financial challenges. Adding Mailchimp furthers our vision to provide an end-to-end customer growth platform to help our customers grow and run their businesses, putting the power of data in their hands to thrive.”
Founded in 1983 by Scott Cook and Tom Proulx, Intuit went public 10 years after its founding and now has more than 10,000 employees in 20 offices in nine locations around the world. Intuit has a market cap of around $152.2 billion after its stock surged over the past few years, driven in part by increased demand for cloud-based small business services. The company’s shares fell 1.8% to $557.42 in New York before the announcement of the deal.
Mailchimp was founded in 2001 in Atlanta by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius. The company, which hasn’t taken any outside funding, offers marketing automation tools for small and medium businesses, mainly based on email marketing. Having 13 million total users globally, 2.4 million monthly active users, and 800,000 paid customers, Mailchimp reported $800 million in revenue in 2020, a 20% year-over-year growth.
“Over the past two decades, we’ve vastly expanded and evolved Mailchimp’s platform to help millions of small businesses around the world start and grow,” said Ben Chestnut, CEO and Co-founder of Mailchimp. “With Intuit, we’ve found a shared passion for empowering small businesses. By joining forces with Intuit, we’ll take our offerings to the next level, leveraging Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform to deliver even better products and services to small businesses. This is an exciting new chapter for Mailchimp, our 1,200+ dedicated employees, and customers.”
The deal is expected to close before the end of Intuit’s fiscal second quarter of 2022, and to add to adjusted earnings per share for the full fiscal year, which ends in July.
Morgan Stanley & Co. acted as financial adviser to Intuit on the acquisition deal, while Latham & Watkins LLP is its legal adviser. Qatalyst Partners is serving as Mailchimp’s exclusive financial advisor and King & Spalding LLP is its legal advisor.
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