Integrate’s acquisition of Akkroo for $34 million is a bold way to enter the EMEA market. Molly Raycraft speaks to its co-founder and former Olympian Jeremy Bloom to discuss what the step means for the brand and its customers
Entering the market place through an acquisition certainly sends a strong message. The US integration platform, Integrate’s $34 million purchase of Akkroo tells everyone it’s landed on this side of the pond and it means business.
It’s Integrate’s first steps ashore European land and through the purchase of the UK event tech brand it now has an EMEA headquarters in London (formerly Akkroo’s office) and an EMEA team of more than 50 fully trained individuals.
This isn’t Integrate’s first acquisition. In January 2019, it acquired US ABM platform, Listen Loop. The nine-year-old company now has its eyes on global expansion and given its history you should expect to see it grow through further acquisitions.
Integrate’s competitive roots
With a founder and CEO like Jeremy Bloom it’s not surprising the business aims high. His illustrious background isn’t what you’d expect from someone in martech but it certainly tells you a lot about his ambitious streak.
Jeremy’s had a career in the US National Football league (or ‘NFL’ – with both the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Stealers). He also competed in the 2002 and 2006 Winter Olympics (Salt Lake City and Turin, respectively) and was the youngest male freestyle skier to ever make the US ski team.
So how, and why, did Jeremy move from athletics to martech? Even he admits it isn’t a natural evolution but it was the Eagle’s partnership with the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania that took him down the road of B2B marketing. It was during this partnership that he became inspired by the start-up space. “I started to plant some seeds to learn more about the industry, which led me to marketing. I wasn’t a marketer, I just treated it like sports; jump in the deep end and swim out of necessity,” says Jeremy.
Tell me about Integrate and what the company offers
Jeremy: Marketers are logging into several different systems to generate demand for their products. Integrate offers a better way by providing a single platform to manage all demand generation efforts at the top of the funnel. Hopefully people will look back in the future and say: ‘I can’t believe I managed all that on a one-off basis’.
What’s the reason behind your acquisition of Akkroo?
There are a number of reasons, but the main one is our customers. The biggest pain point for them is that they sponsor and attend a lot of events but can’t deliver leads from sales until a week after. That’s something they – and we – are really keen to solve. Akkroo allows marketers to capture leads at events through their mobile phone. So that’s where it started.
It also gives us access to a new vertical to sell our collective products and gives us a headquarters in London with about 50 people. That’s hugely beneficial.
The other reason is that there’s cultural alignment between our two companies. Their founders, Chris Wickson and Andy Griggs, have done such a great job creating a culture of performance with people who are excited to be working on this problem together.
What’s the acquisition going to mean for Integrate customers?
The first part is they’ll have 50 full-time employees in London to support their global growth.
The second big part is from a product perspective. They can use Integrate to capture leads at physical events and get them over to the sales teams in real-time. They can also use other demand gen products inside the platform.
Do you think it’s more beneficial to expand via acquisition than build from the ground up?
Yeah, especially in this industry. The benefit of acquiring Akkroo is that they’re already in market, they’re already servicing customers, and they’ve already built the platform so they’ve gone through the mini iterations that it takes to build a product.
We felt it would take a full year to build it, before even testing it with customers. They’re four years into doing that. It’s a huge advantage of speed to market. We needed to start an office in London anyway and now we have 50 people there.
How are you ensuring Integrate and Akkroo merge well?
When you study the reason why private-to-private acquisitions work, the common thread is culture. You need a tight culture that is centred on trust, so cultural alignment really is the number one filter for both of us.
We now have the First Friend Programme. Everybody at Akkroo is getting a friend from Integrate and everybody at Integrate is getting a friend from Akkroo. It’s a buddy system and means they can understand the nuances and differences between the North American team and the roaming team.
We also have a place where people can ask anonymous questions, and people can post an anonymous response. So it solves the insecurity of asking a question if you’re hesitating to ask.
How do those on the ground feel about the acquisition?
We had about 250 people on a video call when we announced the news. The excitement was through the roof for both teams and I think everybody understands why this acquisition may be the 1+1=6 equation, which is what you want.
Will you have to take a different approach to accommodate cultural differences in the UK?
Absolutely. We see cultural differences among different states in the US! We’re very open to change and to people needing to do things in a different way. Chris, Andy and myself are excited about different cultures and different points of view.
I suppose those differences are underpinned by your shared company values?
They really are. Both companies believe in bottom-up management; hiring smart people and getting them to tell you what to do. I think the message for the team is that if you see something that’s not working, or see a cultural difference that you don’t understand, ask about it.
What are the challenges you’ve previously encountered when acquiring companies and how have you overcome them?
The harder acquisitions to make are the ones like Akkroo. It’s doubling revenue every year at a pretty impressive scale. Integrate is also doubling revenue every year at a pretty impressive scale. This means a lot of plate spinning and it can take a lot longer to build trust for new things.
Beyond that is the challenge of integrating different cultures. We recently hired a staff member who will oversee the integration of our companies.
How are you tackling the integration of your tech stack with Akkroo’s?
I think if you fast-forward 12 months from today everything will be fully integrated inside one platform. We’re not going to rush that, we’re going to take our time. Things like the dashboard Akkroo has will probably take three or four quarters to fully integrate.
What we did on day one was build a powerful API (application programming interface) between Integrate and Akkroo. This means our customers can use [the Akkroo capability] to send event leads to Integrate.
