We last wrote about ScribbleLive—the digital publishing company that helps media outlets, sports teams, and brands provide real-time event coverage—a year ago, when they closed a new round of funding and had their eye on expansion. Those ambitions are only getting bigger: ScribbleLive has just announced that it has acquired its best-known competitor, CoverItLive.
The Toronto-based ScribbleLive approached the California-based Demand Media, which owned CoverItLive, because "We noticed that it wasn't a core business of their owners," explains CEO Vincent Mifsud. "It just happened that they were in the process of divesting of many of their assets," he goes on, and the deal went through smoothly, with the help of ScribbleLive's existing financial backers.
It didn't hurt that CoverItLive's engineering team happened to be located in Toronto already, which aided the transition: though the deal was announced just last night, CoverItLive's engineers have already moved into the ScribbleLive offices. The Toronto office is now at about 50 staff, with another 30 working internationally.
"Organically we're growing at around 70-80 per cent," Mifsud says, and ScribbleLive will continue to push that with new acquisitions to "round out our growth."
They are aiming to enhance the platform and services they offer, and given their newly-expanded engineering team, hope to start layering in new functionality shortly. Specifically, Mifsud told us that they are going to be focusing on content strategy planning tools, and at optimization tools that help the clients who use ScribbleLive get the most from the publishing platform.
ScribbleLive and CoverItLive will, in the interim, continue as separate services; they will eventually become a single, fully-integrated platform.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Vincent Mifsud, CEO, ScribbleLive