• by Ray Schultz , November 1, 2021

Intuit, the parent of TurboTax, QuickBooks and other brands, has completed its $12 billion acquisition of Mailchimp, linking two firms that mostly serve small businesses. 

The two firms say they will deliver an end-to-end customer growth platform for small companies.  

QuickBooks customers have imported more than 400,000 customer contacts into their Mailchimp accounts since July, when the firms began testing a one-way integration between QuickBooks Online and Mailchimp. 

The companies will pursue a deeper integration that they say will enable the syncing of customer purchase data between QuickBooks and Mailchimp, and tailored recommendations.  

“We’ll expand our AI-driven expert platform by integrating Mailchimp and QuickBooks in smart ways that will help businesses from start-up to scale-up grow and run with confidence,” states Sasan Goodarzi, CEO of Intuit.

The purchase price included roughly $5.7 billion in cash, funded through cash on hand and a $4.7 billion term loan under a new credit agreement. 

Also part of the deal is stock valued at $6.3 billion, along with 573,000 restricted stock units. 

Founded in Atlanta in 2001, Mailchimp now has over 1,200 employees and has steadily increased its services beyond email. Earlier this year, Mailchimp acquired Chatitive, Inc. a two-way SMS marketing platform.

The business started when Chestnut and co-founder Dan Kurzius lost their jobs.  

“We got laid off,” Chestnut told George Trend in 2020. “We got severance checks, thankfully, and used that money to start the business.” 

While email has been “impacted by privacy changes--namely the recent deprecation of email open tracking by Apple and regulations like GDPR,” observes April Mullen, director of brand and content marketing at SparkPost, which recently was acquired by MessageBird.