M&A Moves: Philly’s Piano is acquiring SocialFlow and Blue Bell’s Anexinet is merging

It’s an acquisition and a merger for two Philadelphia-area companies, as Piano and Anexinet both announced new expansions on Thursday.

Piano acquired SocialFlow

The Bourse-based B2B media software company, which last spring raised an $88 million Series C, has acquired SocialFlow, a New York City social distribution and marketing platform for media companies.

The addition of SocialFlow onto Piano’s platform will help social media teams streamline posting across different platforms, manage paid campaigns and collect user click data for Piano’s media company clients.

“Our goal at Piano is to help organizations bring data together, make it available in real time and leverage it effectively to fuel both analysis and targeting,” Piano CEO Trevor Kaufman in a statement. “Although social media has continued to grow as an integral part of digital strategy, the full scope of its impact has been a blind spot for most brands, limited by the confines of digital marketing attribution models. Adding SocialFlow to our offering will open a new realm of opportunities to create connectors between social media and the on-site user journey, and we’re excited to help our clients enrich their strategies with this new level of digital sophistication.”

A Piano spokesperson told Technical.ly that most of SocialFlow’s 20 employees will join Piano, with the exception of a handful of senior leaders, including CEO Jim Anderson, who will serve as consultants during the transition before departing. Those current SocialFlow employees are working remotely, with most eventually going to work in Piano’s in-progress NYC office when it opens in a few months. Piano has about 650 employees around the world, including its base in Philadelphia — which the company’s leadership has touted as a hub for collaborative work, despite the pandemic.

The financials of the deal are undisclosed, but looking forward, Piano has another undisclosed acquisition coming up, the spokesperson said. We’ll keep an eye out.

Inside Piano’s offices in The Bourse. (Courtesy photo)

Anexinet is merging with Veristor

Anexinet Corporation, a Mill Point Capital LLC portfolio company with offices in Blue Bell and Atlanta, and Georgia’s Veristor Systems Inc. have announced that they are merging.

In a statement, Anexinet CEO Brian Glahn said the deal would allow the IT and technology strategy companies to double their customer base and expand their engineering capabilities.

“By combining our expertise, resources, and geographical reach we are creating a technology solution and service powerhouse,” said Ashby Lincoln, Veristor’s president, CEO and cofounder. “Together, Anexinet and Veristor have the combined strategy, design, engineering, security and managed services practices that will further accelerate technology time-to-value for our mutual clients as they modernize and transform the digital environments that run their businesses.”

Financial details were not disclosed. The deal follows two other recent Anexinet acquisitions of Atlanta-based tech services firms: communication services provider Light Networks in August 2021, and automation services company SereneIT in October 2020. And more could be on the way in the future, a spokesperson said.

Anexinet has around 225 employees, while Veristor counts 125. Together, they’re over 350 team members total. All employees are expected to be retained in the merger. The teams will continue hybrid operation from its corporate offices, with headquarters in both the Northeast and Southeast.