Catalyte acquires The Agency Shop, absorbs its staff

Baltimore-founded workforce development company Catalyte on Monday officially announced that it has brought a digital marketing company, The Agency Shop, under its umbrella via an acquisition.

The two companies had previously been working together for a year before officially merging. Catalyte communications director Adam Curtis told Technical.ly via email that the acquisition officially closed in December, which is also when then-new CEO Matt Derella mentioned the acquisition in a comment to the Baltimore Business Journal. With the acquisition’s completion, Otterbein-based Catalyte will now also train people to join media departments and agencies along with training people to be software developers.

“The Agency Shop came to us with the idea that we could apply our market-tested process for uncovering, unlocking and unleashing software development talent to the digital marketing industry,” said Derella, in a statement. “Now that we’re officially one team, we will continue to build off of these successful pilot projects and deliver the high quality, diverse talent agencies need.”

The Agency Shop founders Eric Yang, Lance Hollander and Kevin Woo will join Catalyte’s leadership team as part of the acquisition. The Agency Shop will add its five employees — distributed across locations like San Francisco, Seattle and Philadelphia — to Catalyte’s just over 700 employees and technical contractors, according to Curtis.

Yang added this partnership will help the shortage of workers and the lack of diversity in the digital media industry.

“For over 20 years, Catalyte has been able to pinpoint individuals from all backgrounds who could be successful in the tech industry,” Yang said in a statement. “We can now leverage that technology and process to create a whole new, high-quality and diverse talent pool for advertising agencies.”

Last month, Catalyte welcomed Derella as the company’s new CEO. Derella took over from Jacob Hsu, who joined the board of directors after leaving his position.

The acquisition follows a record of success for Catalyte, which this past summer earned a $15 million contract from the State of Maryland to help funnel and train more tech talent for state government positions. Catalyte’s program teaches apprentices about data analytics, programmatic ad buying and IT services.

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.