In a major move to advance its vision of being an innovative, end-to-end customer growth platform for small and mid-market businesses, Intuit, the global tech platform for TurboTx, Quickbooks, Mint and Credit Karma, announced today it will acquire Mailchimp, a global small business marketing platform.
The acquisition advances Intuit’s two strategic “Big Bets” of becoming “the center of small business growth and to disrupt the small business mid-market” through its strategic AI-driven platform.
The two companies will bring a range of resources to small and mid-sized businesses, providing a business growth platform that gives them the means to:
- Engage their business activities online,
- Manage customer relationships,
- Leverage a top small to mid-sized business marketing platform,
- Have ready access to insights and analytics for decision making,
- Receive payments,
- Gain greater access to sources of capital,
- Make payments to their employees,
- Optimize their cash flow,
- Organize and stay compliant, and
- Have experts at their fingertips.
Serving as a single source, small and mid-market businesses will be able to combine their customer data from Mailchimp with QuickBooks’ purchase data that will give them actionable insights for growing and running their businesses.
Taking on board Mailchimp’s small business market platform, Intuit will offer more comprehensive services to the client bases of the two global companies, as described by Alex Chriss, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Intuit Small Business and Self-Employed Group.
“Together, Mailchimp and QuickBooks will become a powerful engine for small and mid-market business customers to get, engage and retain their customers, run their businesses, optimize cash flow and remain compliant.”
Since its’ founding in 2001, Atlanta-based Mailchimp has achieved a global reach through its signature email marketing solutions. Its marketing platform that is used by both small and mid-sized businesses provides customer engagement tools, with its marketing automation that is fueled by a powerful, cutting-edge AI-driven technology stack. It has:
- 13 million total users globally, 2.4 million monthly active users, and 800,000 paid customers; with 50 percent of customers outside of the U.S.,
- Data and technology in the form of 70 billion contacts, and 250+ rich partner integrations, and
- AI-powered automation at scale fuels 2.2 million daily AI-driven predictions.
“Over the past two decades, we’ve vastly expanded and evolved Mailchimp’s platform to help millions of small businesses around the world start and grow,” said Ben Chestnut, CEO and Co-founder of Mailchimp. “With Intuit, we’ve found a shared passion for empowering small businesses. By joining forces with Intuit, we’ll take our offerings to the next level, leveraging Intuit’s AI-driven expert platform to deliver even better products and services to small businesses.
Intuit’s QuickBooks has 7 million small and mid-market business customers that will synergize with Mailchimp’s customer base. They represent a great opportunity for Intuit to strategically address the common need of small and mid-sized businesses. One of biggest challenges faced by small business and mid-sized businesses is finding new customers and retaining their existing ones.
This challenge is currently not being met, as almost three-quarters of small businesses do not use a customer relationship management solution. In addition, 84% of small businesses use pen and paper or spreadsheets to reconcile their inventory across channels and 50 % of small businesses fail within the first five years due in large part to cash flow challenges, as noted in Intuit’s press statement.
Mailchimp’s small business marketing platform and Intuit’s financial and technology services in combination will result in a powerful comprehensive resource for businesses to grow, making them a leader in small to mid-sized services that enables them to out-compete others in the same target markets.
“Expanding our platform to be at the center of small and mid-market business growth helps them overcome their most important financial challenges. Adding Mailchimp furthers our vision to provide an end-to-end customer growth platform to help our customers grow and run their businesses, putting the power of data in their hands to thrive,” said Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi.
The acquisition will be completed via approximately $12 billion in cash and stock that is expected to close prior to the end of Intuit’s second quarter fiscal 2022.
