Irvine’s SmartReply Inc., which creates marketing campaigns for retailers, said Monday it bought San Francisco-based mSnap Inc., which runs a network for mobile advertising via text messaging.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“We’re now able to bring to advertisers an immediately scalable mobile advertising network,” said Eric Holmen, SmartReply’s president. “We believe it’s our mission to make the mobile phone valuable for consumers and advertisers.”
mSnap’s shareholders, which include venture capital investors Partech International and First Round Capital, are set to get a stake in SmartReply, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.
SmartReply went after mSnap’s technology that allows advertisers to send targeted text messages and small ads to people via their mobile phones.
Privately held SmartReply has 47 workers in Irvine.
The company said it has half of the top one hundred retail brands in the U.S. and Canada as customers.
MSnap, which started in 2006, counts more than 1,000 radio stations, newspapers and cable TV stations as customers.
It has about a dozen workers and had raised about $6 million in venture funding, the Wall Street Journal reported.
