Mergers and acquisitions round up

You know the drill - it's Friday, which means mergers and acquisitions time. Here's this week's round up: Freelancer acquires Escrow.com for $7.5 million Freelancer completed a $10 million raising in order to fund its acquisition of the US-based escrow services platform Escrow.com for US$7.5 million. Freelancer's CEO Matt Barrie said of the deal, "This highly complementary acquisition will enhance the ability of our 15 million users to transact securely, and there are large opportunities for growth and synergies with core offerings. Finally, it is a strong cornerstone for entering the payments space.” Bigcommerce acquires Zing Ecommerce software provider Bigcommerce has announced its acquisition of Austin-based startup Zing, a provider of mobile retail technologies. The deal is Bigcommerce’s first acquisition, and will see the company absorb Zing’s team and acquire its intellectual property. It will allow Bigcommerce to make a range of APIs and technologies available to its point of sale partners, enabling the development of omni-channel solutions for retailers. Nate Stewart, Zing’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement, “Since the company’s inception, our mission at Zing has been to help business owners sell more effectively through products that simplify and streamline how they manage their retail operations, both online and in store. There is no better embodiment of that mission than Bigcommerce, and we’re thrilled to bring our expertise to a company that has proven itself to be the most flexible and scalable platform for emerging brands to grow their business. SolarWinds acquires Papertrail for $41 million SolarWinds, an IT performance management service, has acquired Papertrail, a log management service, for $41 million in cash. The acquisition will allow SolarWinds to expand its monitoring portfolio. Kevin Thompson, president and CEO of SolarWinds, said, "Our mission with SolarWinds Cloud is to offer IT operations teams the ability to extend the real-time visibility and actionable insights our products provide on-premise to their cloud-based infrastructure so they can effectively manage the performance and accelerated troubleshooting of native cloud applications. The acquisition of Papertrail adds another key element of that overall performance monitoring experience and we look forward to having the Papertrail team and technology as a part of our organization.” In a blog post about the deal, Papertrail co-founder Troy Davis added, "Eric and I started Papertrail to solve a problem we had: create the log management service that we wanted to use as developers and operations engineers ourselves, then make it as easy and as powerful as we can. We’ve done that: Papertrail is a thriving, profitable business trusted by tens of thousands of customers. That’s been fulfilling enough that we’re ready to “double down” and deliver amazing log management and infrastructure visibility at an even larger scale." Venture Republic Group acquires Flocations Japanese company Venture Republic Group, which owns travel sites Hotel.jp and Travel.jp, has acquired Flocations, a Southeast Asian startup that helps consumers find tour packages. Tudor Coman, co-founder of Flocations, told Tech in Asia, "Travel agencies still need a bit of time to get online in Southeast Asia, and having an experienced backer like VRG is perfect for Flocations to continue to offer its services [here]."

Image: SolarWinds CEO Kevin Thompson