Mumbai: Sports media company Nazara Technologies has entered an agreement to acquire 55 per cent stake in programmatic advertising and monetisation company Datawrkz valuing the company at Rs 255 crore (~$30 million) linked to CY 22 EBITDA performance.
“Datawrkz tech offerings will enhance in-house capabilities of Nazara for optimising its customer acquisition spends as well as enhance yields on ad monetisation of its large consumer base,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday. “The ad revenue monetisation is expected to assist many of the companies in the ‘Friends of Nazara’ network.”
Nazara will acquire 33 per cent stake (Rs 60 crore payable of which Rs 35 crore is partly payable in cash and the balance consideration of Rs 25 crore will be paid either in cash or swap of shares) in the first tranche by 22 April. Nazara has reserved an option to acquire an additional 22 per cent in the second tranche that is expected to close in Q4 FY23.
“We, at Nazara, are looking to build strong gaming ad tech offerings globally with the partnership with Datawrkz,” said Nazara Technologies CEO Manish Agarwal. “We strongly believe that growth of gaming-focused ad tech will be exponential in the coming decade across geographies with the growth of gamers and game publishers across freemium, web 3.0 and skill-based real money gaming.”
He further added, “Ad tech companies with deep data processing capabilities and first-party data ownership will emerge as winners in gaming-focused ad tech and will help Datawrkz to create value for itself as well as for Nazara shareholders.”
Datawrkz was founded in 2013 by IIM Ahmedabad alumnus Senthil Govindan and is a global advertising technology firm focused on accelerating user and revenue growth for clients through highly optimised digital advertising. It has offices in the US, Singapore, and India and functions as an independent trading desk to power digital media strategy, planning and execution.
Datawrkz’s self-service product suite for advertisers – Vizibl includes a demand-side platform as well as a customer data platform. On the supply side, Datawrkz generates revenue for publishers through AdPrimus, its supply-side product that drives user engagement, mediates between demand sources and enables audience segmentation.
For the calendar year 2021, Datawrkz posted combined revenue of Rs 90.7 crore (~$12.1 million) and EBIDTA margin of 12 per cent with around 70 per cent of its revenue coming from the US as per CY 2021 unaudited financial statements.
“We had started this company with a vision to disrupt the digital advertising space,” said Datawrkz founder Senthil Govindan. “Datawrkz was already on a fast track to achieve our objective with rapid growth and satisfied clients around the world. Through our partnership with Nazara, I see our pace accelerating further. While Datawrkz will be able to immediately bring our natural strengths to bear within the existing Nazara fold, this also gives both sides a tremendous opportunity to build global advertising and publisher monetization products with a sharp focus on the gaming vertical.”
“As always, it’s a great moment for us to welcome a new friend to our ‘Friends of Nazara’ network and I believe Senthil and the entire Datawrkz team will add great value to what we are building at Nazara over the next few years,” added Nazara Technologies founder and joint MD Nitish Mittersain.
