Mavrck Buys Later with $135m Investment

Influencer marketing platform Mavrck has acquired social media marketing and commerce platform Later, using a $135m investment from equity investor Summit Partners.

Vancouver-based Later offers a visual marketing platform for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, to help small business owners and creators grow their brands and companies. Its tools include machine-learning-based recommendations, visual scheduling, media management, marketing and analytics. The latter includes the ability to access insights from social media sites, plus additional analytics for calculating engagement rates and best times to post.

Summit Partners was also the sole investor when Mavrck raised $120m just four months ago. Following the takeover, Later will continue to operate as a standalone product and business unit, while working with Mavrck to solve creator measurement and monetization issues. Mavrck co-founder and CEO Lyle Stevens will head up a new senior team comprised of leaders from both companies, including Roger Patterson (pictured), co-founder and CEO of Later, who will oversee the Later business unit as President and join the Mavrck Board of Directors.

Stevens comments: 'Creators add tremendous value to brands, but the ability to measure that value remains a challenge. Together, Mavrck and Later are committed to building an ecosystem of trust between marketers and creators - powered by proprietary data and designed to add transparency to the compensation process. Specifically, incorporating Later's social insights into the Mavrck platform will help brands search for creators based on historic traffic generated by Later's link-in-bio solution and, in turn, help drive a better brand fit'.

Web sites: www.mavrck.co and www.later.com .