Oribi Acquired by LinkedIn for $80M-90M to Expand Marketing Technology

LinkedIn, the popular social networking platform to help professionals connect

worldwide, has found work with upwards of 810 million users. It has a long-standing

business in marketing and advertising on its own platform. Linkedin announced an

acquisition that could point to its ambitions to provide more analytics and insights across the

wider internet. The Microsoft-owned networking platform has taken over Oribi, a Tel Aviv

startup specializing in marketing attribution technology. With this deal, LinkedIn will

establish its first office in Israel.

As per the sources, LinkedIn paid between $80 million and $90 million for Oribi, a figure it

seems other outlets are also reporting.

As per PitchBook Data, Oribi, as a startup, had raised just under $28 million in funding from

investors, including Sequoia, TLV Partners, Ibex, and others.

The deal is interesting on two levels. First, LinkedIn plans to continue investing in its

marketing and advertising services, an area growing at a fast clip for the company. Tomer

Cohen, the Chief product officer, says that marketing services revenues have grown 43%

year-over-year. But with some 57 million businesses “building their brands on Pages” and

over 24,000 virtual events being created weekly on LinkedIn, there is clearly lot more growth

that can be tapped here if those businesses are given more functionality and tools to realize

that.

Second, the acquisition of Oribi specifically points to a sea change in what LinkedIn is setting

out to do in marketing. Oribi’s mission is to democratize web analytics, i.e., it aims to make it

easier for smaller companies to build and run customized analytics to measure the impact of

their marketing strategies.

As per Iris Shoor, “A lot of companies are more focused on the high end….Usually, these

solutions are very much based on a lot of technical resources and integrations — these are

the Mixpanels and Heap Analytics and Adobe Marketing Clouds.”

Notably, Oribi competes with the likes of Google Analytics. LinkedIn in an association with

Microsoft is also squaring up against one aspect of the formidable Google digital advertising

and marketing machine.

Cohen wrote, “Through the integration of Oribi’s technology into our marketing solutions

platform, our customers will benefit from enhanced campaign attribution to optimize the ROI

of their advertising strategies”. “This means that our customers will be able to more easily

measure website conversions with automated tags and code-free technology, as well as build

more effective audiences, all in a way that is privacy-first by design.”