Philly-tied ecommerce firm SUMO Heavy has been acquired by ITX

SUMO Heavy, an ecommerce company that was previously headquartered in Philadelphia, has been acquired by the Rochester-based global software development company ITX.

CEO Bart Mroz and his cofounder, CTO Robert Brodie, started the company in 2010 in Philadelphia. They moved to New York City for seven years, but returned to Philly in 2019.

Mroz told Technical.ly this acquisition came about after meeting Sean Flaherty, ITX’s EVP of innovation, about a year ago. ITX is much larger, with about 300 employees compared to Sumo’s 10, he said, but he saw that the way they worked with clients was similar to SUMO.

“The culture has been almost exactly the same. We always looked at it from a perspective of, they’re just a larger version of us,” Mroz said. “So that fit what we thought is the best way to grow our services — because we were smaller and have certain limitations with some services, whereas now it opens up bigger service offerings for our clients. And obviously, the opposite also happens to ITX, where we’re bringing a lot more into the space for them from the ecommerce perspective.”

All 10 of SUMO’s employees came over to ITX, and there were no layoffs with the acquisition, per the execs. Mroz joined ITX as engagement lead and Brodie joined the company as delivery director. (We call that an acquihire.)

“ITX is proud to add SUMO Heavy’s eCommerce expertise to our existing capabilities in transaction- and data-centric industries like financial services and healthcare,” ITX CEO Ralph Dandrea said in an announcement. “We are also extremely excited to welcome another highly skilled team of problem solvers and an impressive roster of clients to ITX.”

Mroz hopes this acquisition brings growth, mentorship and expansion to other services.

“One of the things we’ve always talked about [is] having UX and design which we never did,” he said. “This was a fun way to have expansion in those services. So not only working for our clients, but working in a bigger scope of what ITX does.”

SUMO previously maintained an office in Old City, but after the pandemic forced remote work, the company went remote. Mroz said many of SUMO’s employees are still based in the Philadelphia region.

Mroz himself is now in Jersey City, and Brodie is in Birdsboro. The CEO said he moved out of the Philly region for personal reasons, but plans to stay involved in the Philly tech community. This move also gives him the flexibility to travel easily to both Philly and New York.

“I’ve been around the tech community for so long,” said Mroz, who was one of Indy Hall’s first full-time members. “A lot of this stuff after the pandemic is coming back and trying to figure out some more meetups and [going] to networking events and being still around, a little less obviously just because of distance sometimes for me, but trying to do more things in Philly would be really fun.”

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.