• by Philip Rosenstein , July 17, 2017

Rubicon Project announced on Monday the acquisition of programmatic advertising technology firm nToggle for an aggregate cash consideration (minus debt and fees) of $38.5 million.

The move comes after Rubicon faced strong headwinds earlier this year. Despite beating Q1 2017 projections, its earnings were down year-over-year.

The purchase will enable Rubicon to integrate  nToggle's bid request optimization technology to "help us better understand the relationship between buyers and sellers" and create a more cost-effective programmatic buying experience for clients, Tom Kershaw, Rubicon Project’s CTO, told Digital News Daily.

NToggle’s technology is particularly well suited to deal with the infrastructure costs that come with header bidding and the billions of impressions available daily, according to the company.

“Programmatic buying right now is too difficult,” Kershaw added. “With the advent of header bidding and the like, there are too many transactions that happen simultaneously for buyers to wrap their heads around. Adding nToggle technology to our platform gives the buyer more control.”

“It’s not too difficult to find 20 people in a crowd,” said Kershaw. “What we want to offer clients is the ability to find 20 people in a crowd of millions" through targeting.

The deal was completed on July 14, and is expected to modestly increase Rubicon's expenses in 2017.