How do you Create a Win-Win-Win Acquisition?

It starts with customers and ends with customers. Let’s share an example:

Acquia, the open source digital experience company, announced today that it has acquired Mautic, creator of the world’s only open marketing automation and campaign management platform.

As the earliest investor in both Mautic and Acquia, I couldn’t be more excited about the win-win of marketing and digital experience merging into a single open platform. But there’s an essential third win this enables, which is for their customers.

The History

We at Underscore VC have been active in open source for more than 15 years, running programs like The Future of Open Source and backing open source companies to highlight its potential. So it’s been gratifying to see open source out-innovate and transform nearly every function in the enterprise. Last year alone, open source created over eight billion dollars in value as companies like Elastic transformed search, Mulesoft reinvented integration, and MongoDB reimagined databases.

But until recently, one area remained untouched by open source — Marketing.

Customers have been stuck in stovepipe legacy products that have fallen behind as technology rapidly changes and new channels emerge in our increasingly digital world.

This pain has become acute as brands struggle to survive digitization and retailers face the onslaught of Amazon, or services lose relevance as our world becomes more disintermediated. All while customers continue to expect an engaging and coordinated experience across all channels.

Meanwhile, a dizzying array of thousands of point products have been developed and, because they’re all proprietary and incomplete, they have left the marketer in “Integration Hell.”

The Future

Enter Mautic, the first and only open marketing cloud.

Unlike legacy vendors and the plethora of martech point products, Mautic has delivered an open and extensible platform, that today seamlessly integrates over a hundred different solutions in the single Mautic open marketing cloud.

To date, Mautic has reached more than 250,000 users across 188 countries. Its ease of use, flexibility, and feature completeness has quickly won over many marketers. The company’s top-line grew almost 400 percent year-over-year, and its number of customers tripled as Mautic won multiple awards for product innovation and customer service.

As Acquia and Mautic’s communities both work from the same GPL open source license and on the same tech stack, we are excited to see them emerge as the largest open source community in the world. It’s a community that’s uniquely able to evolve and openly extend their marketing and digital experience platform to serve the needs of the largest organizations. These organizations can look forward to engaging their end customers in new and exciting ways that keep them loyal and attentive.

“Mautic has proven that marketers want the option to build and deploy digital experiences on their own terms — and we haven’t even reached the tipping point of demand. As advancements in AI, voice, and connected devices raise the bar for customer experience, there is a growing need to innovate at the edge of customer expectations — one that only open source can satisfy.”  -DB Hurley, Mautic Founder & CTO

Acquia and Mautic combined already serve the global 1000, reaching across every industry, and this merger will enable them to give their customers a competitive advantage. It will deliver a faster time to market for their customers and better ways to engage their end users on a rewarding journey together.

“The future of marketing is open… Open source developer communities have continually innovated ahead of the market — maximizing marketing investments instead of rendering them obsolete. Mautic builds on our vision to deliver an Open Digital Experience Platform for our customers and partners. We’ve created the only true alternative to the stale marketing clouds that restrict marketers from the freedom to innovate.” - Michael Sullivan, Acquia CEO

The Bold Entrepreneurs That Made it Possible

Let us not forget that this first-ever open digital experience cloud is made possible by bold entrepreneurs who have dared to change our world for the better. We are honored to invest in and work with visionary founders of the caliber of Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal who we worked with to found Acquia more than ten years ago, and DB Hurley, who started the open source movement for marketing with Mautic.

Because of Underscore's Core Community model, Dries is a Core Partner who was actually part of the Mautic investment decision we made. He's seen in the pictures below taken in 2016 at Acquia with DB and other members of the Underscore marketing Core and open source Core who also invested in Mautic alongside us. There were 7 Core Partners and 15 Core Syndicate members who participated in Mautic alongside Underscore VC. Thank you to Tim Bertrand, Erica Brescia, Gail Goodman, Mike Volpe, Jay Batson, Jono Bacon, Tom Wentworth, Kyle York, Mark Gally, Maia Heymann, Spencer Pingry, Doron Reuveni, Andrew Aitken, Larry Augustin, Jit Saxena and Jeffrey Barnett for all your help.

We are humbled and beyond excited to see the dynamic duo, of DB and Dries and their newly joined teams, working to deliver the world’s first Open Digital Experience Platform.

“In today’s world, brands need to engage with their customers in a unified and intelligent way. With this acquisition, we are combining open source content management with open source marketing automation. Just as Drupal disrupted web content management, we believe Mautic disrupts the marketing automation world with open source, providing our customers with faster innovation, more agility, more flexibility, and better integrations.” -Dries Buytaert, Acquia Co-Founder, CTO & Chairman

Open Source (Marketing + Digital Experience) * Largest Community = Customer Acquia Mautic Win-Win-Win

Congratulations to the team and our broader Core community that made this win-win-win possible! You’ve inspired all of us at Underscore to double down on Boston and continue to invest in the next wave of founders working on innovative business models like open source, new technologies like AI/ML, and applications creating competitive advantage through digital transformation.

More than ever the future is being invented by bold entrepreneurs who dare to change our world for the better so if you’re one of them get in touch! And in the meantime, follow along on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram and subscribe to the Underscore monthly Core Community newsletter!

Read More: Acquia Acquires Mautic to Create The Open Digital Experience Platform — By Dries Buytaert

Read More: Acquia Buys Open Source Marketing Automation Software Firm Mautic — By Xconomy