In the white heat of the current tech market it's sometimes easy to forget that some companies, although taking their time, simply become viable businesses - instead of waiting for a call from Facebook or Twitter that may never come. I've been covering web site and shop builder Moonfruit for longer than I care to remember, but along way husband and wife team Joe and Wendy White kept on pushing the company until it was one of the most innovative of its kind out there. Today that hard work is rewarded in Moonfruit's acquisition by directories giant Yell for $29 million (£18m) in cash.
Unusually for a UK acquisition announcement, Yell has also made the golden hand-cuffs explicit for the founders. Retention bonuses of up to £2.7 million in aggregate will be paid to Moonfruit's executive management team of Joe White, Eirik Pettersen and Wendy Tan-White after two years, provided that they remain exclusively employed by Yell.
Most people know Yell as a yellow pages directory for its 1.3 million SME customers. Clearly what it must become to survive in the era of Google is a online marketplace providing not just listings but business tools for that market.
Over 5 million sites and 230,000 shops have been built using Moonfruit, which is now the no. 1 hosted site builder in the UK, and has seen over 1.5 million sites built in the US.
Moonfruit's engine will be a key component of Yell's new "eMarketplace" strategy comprising a platform and portal where consumers and SMEs can connect and transact.
Yell already has an enterprise commerce solution in the form of Znode, an Ohio company it acquired last year for $19.2 million (£12 million).
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/business/yell-expands-mobile-selling-with-znode-6420588.html
What Yell did not have however was the ability for customer to create "light" commerce and web presence services in the way Moonfruit had.
Both parties seem to win out of this deal. Yell gets a much better offering for SMEs which pulls them out of the pit of just being a classifieds provider, while is accelerates Moonfruit's own expansion worldwide, building on its growth in the UK and US.
Mike Pocock, Chief Executive Officer of Yell, said: "The addition
of Moonfruit's services and team helps us provide competitive advantage to our global SME customers in connecting with consumers through digital, mobile and
social."
Moonfruit took £1.57 million in funding in 2010 from US investment bank Stephens and Silicon Valley based angels including Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Robbie Van-Adibe and Theorem.
The value of the assets, which are the subject of the transaction, as reflected on Moonfruit's balance sheet as at 31 December 2011, is £4.88 million. For the year ended 31 December 2011, Sitemaker Software Limited, Moonfruit's wholly-owned subsidiary, made a loss before tax of £1.26 million.
This story originally appeared in TechCrunch.
