AdRoll expands its B2B data and tech by acquiring Growlabs

AdRoll Group announced today that it has acquired Growlabs, a two-year-old startup with business-to-business sales tools and data.

While AdRoll is best known for its retargeting technology for consumer advertising, it's been building out a suite of B2B marketing technology under its RollWorks business unit, which launched earlier this year.

The company says that by marrying its artificial intelligence technology with Growlabs' database of 12 million companies and 320 million business identities, as well as the startup's lead generation and sales automation tools, it can help customers run multi-channel campaigns with messages that are automatically sequenced to the sales stage.

Asked why Growlabs was an appealing acquisition target, CEO Toby Gabriner (who joined AdRoll last year) told me via email that both quantity and quality of data is crucial for building an account-based marketing program.

"Growlabs has not only built one of the largest B2B data-sets, but more importantly they have developed a number of industry leading techniques to ensure that the data is accurate," Gabriner said. "With the combination of the Growlabs and AdRoll Group identity graphs, our RollWorks division will provide our customers access to one of the largest independent B2B identity graphs in the world."

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Gabriner said the entire 18-person Growlabs team will be joining AdRoll.

"Our mission has always been to help marketers grow fast - a mission we share with AdRoll Group," said Growlabs CEO Ben Raffi in the acquisition announcement. "Together, we'll accelerate marketers' ability to drive revenue."