Kibo, a market leader in modern, omnichannel commerce, announces the sale of its personalization business to Centre Lane Partners, a private investment firm that focuses on growing middle-market companies. The new stand-alone personalization entity will be branded Monetate, and Brian Wilson, the current chief operating officer of Kibo, will lead Monetate as its chief executive officer.
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“We are extremely excited to partner with Centre Lane on this next chapter of our journey as a leader in personalization”
Since 2015, Kibo has focused on solving the most pressing commerce challenges of the market and has invested heavily in building the best products and teams in service of those goals. With the acquisitions of Monetate and Certona in 2019, Kibo embarked on a strategic effort to integrate the two powerful solutions into a best-in-class personalization platform to complement its commerce business. The result has been an industry-leading, purpose-built personalization solution that, with hundreds of clients and growing, is proven to meet the needs of the market. This transaction will unlock the full potential of the personalization business and enable Kibo to pursue a horizontal growth strategy in verticals outside of retail, such as financial services, travel & hospitality, and telecommunications, as well as to further expand its global footprint.
“We are extremely excited to partner with Centre Lane on this next chapter of our journey as a leader in personalization,” said Brian Wilson. “With the power of product recommendations, 1×1 personalization, personalized search, and A/B testing in a single unified personalization platform combined with the re-launch of the Monetate brand, we are well positioned to pursue our go-forward growth strategy that will build upon our strong retail footprint while continuing to expand into other markets.”
Similarly, this transaction will enable Kibo to focus on investing in its core eCommerce and Order Management products, as well as to realize its full potential in the composable commerce space, integrating with market-leading content management and personalization platforms. With a fully modular, API-first, cloud-native, and headless architecture, Kibo has delivered a strong, differentiated commerce vision, recognized as a leader in composable commerce. Going forward, Kibo will be able to dedicate the full force of its focus, funding, and teams toward realizing an even stronger position in the commerce landscape.
“We have lofty goals of continuing to be the market-leading voice in commerce. With our fully composable, API-first, cloud-native commerce solution, we offer multiple paths to solve business needs and we do it without boxing clients into a narrow ecosystem or a single way to implement. Instead of making our clients work for the technology, we make technology work for our clients,” said Ram Venkataraman, the current chief technology officer of Kibo, who will serve as chief executive officer of Kibo moving forward.
Kibo and Monetate will continue to partner closely to ensure that joint clients and prospects have an optimal customer experience and realize the full value of both companies’ products. RBC Capital Markets is serving as financial advisor and Kirkland & Ellis is serving as legal advisor to Kibo. Centre Lane is receiving legal advice from Jones Day.