Intuit is in talks to buy Mailchimp for more than $10 billion,
according to a report in Bloomberg on Wednesday morning.
No final decision has been made, and there are other potential buyers interested, Bloomberg adds, quoting
anonymous sources.
The deal would be Intuit’s largest, and would strengthen its SMB offerings. But it might be a good fit for the firm that offers TurboTax and
QuickBooks software.
Massimo Arrigoni, CEO of BEE, predicted last month to MediaPost that Intuit could be a player.
Asked about potential
buyers, he answered: “Any large company that has a strong focus on small businesses: take a company like Intuit, that serves mostly small businesses: market cap of $148b. They could
certainly afford it and would be adding a whole new marketing layer to their offering."
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He continued: “Another potential buyer, although they have had quite a rivalry
over the last several years, is Shopify, market cap of $186b.”
Arrigoni added that “HubSpot too could be interested in growing their penetration in SMBs, so that they automatically
become the platform of choice as those small businesses scale up. In their case, given their $31b valuation, it would be a big purchase for them. There are many others: even Microsoft itself could see
something like Mailchimp as a marketing extension of Office 365.”
The news comes as Atlanta-based Mailchimp has steadily increased its services for SMBs beyond email. For example,
earlier this year, Mailchimp acquired Chatitive, Inc. a two-way SMS marketing platform. And in May, it rolled out Stores, a tool that allows merchants to recreate brick-and-mortar
retail experiences through an intuitive e-commerce platform.
But it still focuses largely on email: Last year, Mailchimp clients sent roughly 335 billion emails on the platform.
That
is slightly down from the 340 billion sent in 2019. But Mailchimp’s client base has grown from 12 million users in 2019 to 14 million in 2020.
The company reportedly has annual revenue
of around $300 million.