Intuit to buy Mailchimp for $12 billion.

Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax and QuickBooks, will acquire Mailchimp, a company best known as a provider of email marketing services, the companies announced on Monday.

The cash-and-stock deal, which is subject to regulatory approvals, will value Mailchimp at about $12 billion.

The deal is Intuit’s largest to date and is a notable expansion into customer-relationship management for a company largely known for its finance software. Intuit hopes to combine Mailchimp’s digital marketing services with QuickBooks, its accounting program, to help small businesses manage their customers as well as their books.

“The real magic is actually in the power of the data,” Intuit’s chief executive, Sasan Goodarzi, said in an interview. “When we bring the platforms together, I’ll actually not only know who I marketed it to, but what you bought when you bought it.”

Shares of Intuit have risen about 75 percent over the past year, giving it a market capitalization of $152 billion.

Mailchimp, founded in 2001 and based in Atlanta, is best known for its email marketing platform, which it has advertised in abundance on podcasts such as “Serial.” Its platform has grown to include marketing services and software for tracking customer engagement. It has about 13 million total users globally and 800,000 paid customers, half of which are outside the United States.

As it has expanded, Mailchimp has not taken on any outside money. As part of the deal, Intuit is carving out about $300 million in equity for Mailchimp’s employees to help with retention. After the deal closes, it will issue an additional $200 million in stock to Mailchimp employees.

Small businesses have been a major focus for Intuit. Its small-business and self-employed unit made up about half its $9.6 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year. While the pandemic hurt small businesses, it also forced more to manage their finances online, driving sales for the unit up 16 percent over the year prior.

Intuit has also been focused on building its consumer-finance platform. Last year it paid $7.1 billion for the credit-monitoring app Credit Karma. That deal, though, hit regulatory scrutiny, forcing Credit Karma to sell its tax business to win approval from the federal government.

Mr. Goodarzi said he was confident that Intuit would be able to close its acquisition of MailChimp by the end of January.

“This is really in a totally different market,” he said. “We don’t foresee any challenges.”

source: nytimes.com