Singapore’s Amobee is acquiring Kontera and Adconion for $359 million

Singapore Telecommunications’ digital advertising company Amobee has said that it will buy content marketing startup Kontera as well as cross-channel advertising company Adconion. The deal will cost around $359 million, according to a statement on the news. Amobee already can handle programmatic advertising for digital and mobile ads. It can display three-dimensional mobile ads on Android and iOS devices, and it also offers an analytics tool. It claims to allow for the delivery of ads to 1.4 billion people on mobile devices by way of more than 1,000 ad networks and ad publishers.

Another day, and another two big acquisitions in the digital advertising industry. Amobee, a mobile ad company acquired by Singapore’s main carrier SingTel two years ago for $321 million, is buying up not one but two other companies to build out its position in the wider digital ads space: It’s gobbling up Adconion and Kontera, for $235 million and $150 million, respectively. Amobee notes that the consideration payable for Adconion Direct North America and Adconion Australia (the two divisions of Adconion) is approximately $209 million, excluding debt. Both Adconion and Kontera will become a part of SingTel. Adconion, which has been around since 2005, had raised some $114 million from investors like Index Ventures and Wellington. Among the company’s twists and turns over the years, in 2009 it picked up the failed video network Joost — originally founded by the creators of Skype with lots of high hopes – and in 2012 folded it into smartclip, Adconion’s existing online video ads business. The company says it has some 2,000 clients on its platform.