Yahoo is poised to buy mobile analytics and ad platform company Flurry, according to people with knowledge of the situation.
While any deal could go south, sources said this transaction could be announced as early as later today, with a price in the “hundreds of millions” for the San Francisco-based startup.
The move is an interesting one for Yahoo, which has been trying to up its mobile efforts, in the face of a quickly declining display advertising and PC-based business. That said, its mobile business — while laudable — is still small — so small that the company still does not break out its revenue or any tiny profits it might have realized.
That is in contrast to other players like Facebook and Google, which have drastically improved their mobile businesses over the last two years.
Founded in 2005, Flurry describes its focus as “optimizing the mobile experience for developers, marketers and consumers through personalized ads and mobile analytics.” It recently launched, for example, a new video advertising solution for app publishers.
The ad network is the more recent part, but the analytics about smartphone usage is more valuable as Flurry’s technology is installed on 500,000 apps, tracking activity on more than a billion devices.
Flurry has gotten just over $70 million in funding from players like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and First Round Capital, starting out its life as an app developer. Its last $12.5 million round was in December.
The company has brought in a lot of experienced execs over the last year, including former Google and Facebook exe Prashant Fuloria as chief product officer in April of 2013. Flurry added a new COO and CFO in the fall, after CEO Simon Khalaf had said the company was cash-flow positive and hinted at a possible IPO.
I guess not.
I have a call into Flurry for comment. I might call Yahoo for comment, but that’s like hoping to win the lottery. (Wait, I would score big at Instant Scratch a lot faster than hearing back from that group of anti-PR drones at Yahoo.)
