Austin-based digital advertising company OwnLocal announced its acquisition this week of Sidengo, a fellow Austin tech startup, in an effort to amp up its own services for small businesses. Sidengo, founded in 2011 as a site-building service for customers with limited design and coding skills, will now be integrated into OwnLocal's digital advertising platform.
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OwnLocal co-founders Ambrust and Mims
"Acquiring Sidengo's product team gives us expertise we haven't had in the past," said OwnLocal CEO Lloyd Ambrust through a press release. "Their complementary technology will integrate with OwnLocal and be a great benefit to our small business customers."
Co-founded in 2010 by Ambrust and Jeremy Mims, OwnLocal has helped traditional local media outlets -- predominantly newspapers, radio and television stations -- earn revenue by creating digital marketing campaigns for their advertisers. With the acquisition of Sidengo, the company plans to offer the site-builder's user-friendly web development capabilities to their 20,000 existing small business customers and 1,500 newspaper partners in Australia, Canada and the US. In the past four years, Sidengo has helped clients build more than 25,000 active websites.
Although the terms of the acquisition are undisclosed, it's the latest in a series of strategic advances made by the ad agency. Last May, it acquired SEO software developer Whoosh Traffic, Inc., in another undisclosed transaction. OwnLocal had 22 employees prior to this week's deal, which includes Sidengo's team of two. Both companies are headquartered at Capital Factory.
Moving forward, OwnLocal says it will continue supporting Sidengo's current clients but otherwise offer its web-building technology only through its media partners. The Y Combinator alum has raised around $2 million to date from investors including Automattic, Baseline Ventures, 500 Startups and Justin Kitch, and in 2011 became one of the first for-profit entities to receive early-stage capital from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with the Knight Enterprise Fund for media innovation.
