Kabbage, a financial technology company for small businesses, has agreed to acquire Radius Intelligence, a small-business customer data platform for B2B revenue teams. Following the acquisition, Kabbage will gain insights into more than 20 million small businesses in the U.S., positioning the company to better understand and serve the market. Terms of the deal were undisclosed.
The announcement was made more than a year after Radius went into an agreement to merge with the audience management platform Leadspace in April 2018. However, the merger was called off later that year. Despite the merger falling through, Radius provided a statement at the time noting that the two platforms would operate independently, but would partner to support joint customers.
“Data has always been our competitive advantage, and Radius strengthens it by adding millions of new and verified small business insights to our platform,” said Rob Frohwein, CEO of Kabbage, in a statement. “These new technology and data-analysis capabilities further differentiate us from other SMB-focused FinTech companies as we dramatically expand our product set and service platform to address the unique cash flow needs of small businesses.”
At close, nearly 20 Radius team members will join the Kabbage San Francisco office. CEO Joel Carusone will also join to support the integration of the two companies and technology platforms.
“We’re thrilled to join the Kabbage team. As a company dedicated to small business analytics and data management, we’ve always had a deep respect for Kabbage’s data-driven technology and focus,” said Carusone in a statement. “Our companies have complementary technical architectures and domain experience for decision making. With Kabbage, we can build a more sophisticated analytics solution to identify, reach and serve small businesses.”
The recent acquisition announcements such as Kabbage/Radius, as well as Dun & Bradstreet’s plans to acquire Lattice Engines, industry experts note leaders have more room to innovate.
“When vendors like these get bought by larger companies, innovation tends to suffer. The remaining independent CDPs will have more room to innovate,” said David Raab, Founder of the CDP Institute, in a statement to Demand Gen Report. “I expect that they’ll improve their data collection, profile assembly and sharing capabilities, which are core CDP use cases. This will remain important as a way to reduce the fragmentation of B2B martech stacks — which is even worse than B2C stacks because B2B marketers use at least as many tools with much smaller databases and marketing teams. But, I also expect B2B CDPs to offer more integrated applications, such as content optimization and campaign management because B2B marketers need unified orchestration, as well as unified data to really tame the product proliferation that plagues them.”
