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.
Since 2015, Kibo has focused on solving the market’s most pressing business challenges and invested heavily in creating the best products and teams to serve these goals. With the acquisition of Monetate and Certona in 2019, Kibo embarked on a strategic effort to integrate these two powerful solutions into a leading personalization platform to complement its business. The result is an industry-leading purpose-built personalization solution, with hundreds of customers and growing, proven to meet the needs of the market. This transaction will unleash the full potential of its personalization business and enable Kibo to pursue a vertical growth strategy outside of retail, such as financial services, travel and hospitality, and telecommunications, as well as further expand its global reach.
“We are extremely excited to partner with Centre Lane on this next chapter of our journey as a leader in personalization,”
“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.”
Brian Wilson, chief operating officer of Kibo.
Also, by merging with industry-leading content management and personalization platforms, this deal will allow Kibo to concentrate on developing its core eCommerce and Order Management products and to reach its full potential in the composable commerce sector. Kibo, a pioneer in composable commerce, has developed a powerful, distinct commerce vision with a fully modular, API-first, cloud-native, and headless architecture. In the future, Kibo will be able to devote all of its attention, resources, and personnel to achieving an even stronger position in the commerce scene.
“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,”
Ram Venkataraman, the current chief technology officer of Kibo, who will serve as chief executive officer of Kibo moving forward.
To guarantee that shared customers and prospects receive the best possible customer service and fully appreciate the value of both firms’ products, Kibo and Monetate will continue to work closely together. Kibo is being advised financially by RBC Capital Markets and legally by Kirkland & Ellis. Jones Day is providing legal counsel to Centre Lane.
