We’ve acquired Mogreet – The future of mobile is here!
I’m delighted to share the news that today we completed our strategic acquisition of Mogreet, a unique and innovative mobile marketing company. This is a significant new chapter in payvia’s story but before I explain why it is great news for our customers, our team and the mobile ecosystem I’d like to talk about what brought us to where we are today.
My co-founders and I created the company that would become payvia in 2004. The mobile internet was in its infancy compared to today, but we believed in a future where the device in our pockets would become a supercomputer that we relied on in every aspect of our lives. Our success, as a company that was profitable from day one, and operates North America’s largest direct carrier connected infrastructure, was rewarded in 2007 when leading private equity firm Silver Lake Sumeru acquired a majority stake in us.
In 2012 we drew on our mobile industry heritage to launch our sophisticated mobile payments platform. We knew we were entering a fragmented and complex market but one with great potential. We were confident we had what it took to succeed thanks to the strong mobile heritage that has seen us pay out over $2 billion in mobile commerce revenues to businesses and developers and send billions of business-to-consumer messages annually.
We realized this confidence was justified when our very first mobile payments customer was the President of the United States! We proved our ability to innovate, creating the first ever ‘text to contribute’ technology, pioneered by both candidates in the 2012 Presidential Election. Since then we’ve won hundreds of mobile payment solution contracts from some incredible companies and have established ourselves as the leader in carrier-billed mobile payments.
The mobile industry expertise that made us so strong out of the gates also led us to understand the disconnect in today’s mobile solutions: mobile payments are not directly tied to the mobile marketing solutions our customers use to target and engage consumers. We began discussing this disconnect with customers and realized it was a big pain point for them. Their mobile marketing campaigns were not sufficiently tied to purchase and their mobile payments technology didn’t allow for seamless on-going engagement. They were dealing with multiple partners, often without direct carrier connections, and faced numerous hurdles in their rollout process tremendously impacting their time to market.
It was these conversations with our valued customers that ultimately led us to Mogreet.
Mogreet’s founders, James Citron and Norm Schifman, recognized the potential of mobile video and rich media early and built an impressive mobile marketing business whose solutions are used by thousands of marketers, retailers, small businesses and developers including major brands such as Cox Media Group, Emmis Digital and Gamefly to engage with consumers through branded communications. From our earliest discussions it was clear that the synergies between us were amazing – not only in terms of our products, but also in our vision and our teams.
It’s often said in our industry that we over-estimate the short-term impact of new technologies and underestimate their significance for the long-term. Like payvia, Mogreet understands that we are today on the cusp of seeing the real impact of mobile commerce. By solving the disconnect between payments and engagement we are giving businesses the industry’s only seamless and direct carrier connected mobile solution, to attract, convert and retain more customers. In doing so, we are destined to accelerate mobile’s share of the $252 billion e-commerce market.
As we move forward in this exciting chapter of payvia’s story I want to thank our customers and partners for their support. We can’t wait to show them all the great things we’ll do together. I also want to thank the amazing payvia and Mogreet teams for their dedication and hard work. By joining we will realize some incredible synergies that we are only starting to appreciate and will grow the market together.
The future of mobile is here.
Darcy Wedd, CEO and co-founder, payvia