M&A GOSSIP: Facebook Wants To Buy This Woman’s Company, Wildfire, For ~$250 Million
“A couple weeks after Oracle bought Vitrue for $300 million and Salesforce.com bought Buddy Media for ~$700 million, the gossip we’re hearing is that the next social media marketing tools provider to sell will be Victoria Ransom‘s Wildfire Interactive.
That’s Ransom, a Kiwi, on the right.
On its Web site, Wildfire describes itself as “an easy-to-use yet powerful tool to grow, engage, and monetize your audience on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.”
Facebook, we’re told, is a leading suitor. This makes some sense. Facebook needs to find a way to tax marketers for the value they get out of pushing their products using Facebook’s free tools.
We don’t know a price, but you have to figure it would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. One number we heard: $250 million.
Our source on this gossip says Goldman Sachs is Wildfire’s banker, and that Goldman is pushing Wildfire to include more bidders.
Given that Google wanted to buy Buddy Media, but lost out, it’s probably safe to assume its interested.
We reached out to Goldman, Wildfire, and Facebook for this story. None responded. It’s OK, if they had talked to us, they would have declined to comment on rumors and speculation, which is actually what this story is. We thought you’d like to hear the whispers anyway.”
Life is short,have fun!!! 