AppHub Buys Leicester's Reviews.io

Ecommerce enablement platform AppHub has acquired Reviews.io, whose software facilitates customer reviews, loyalty programs, surveys and the management of user-generated content. Reports suggest the buyer paid around $72m in cash and shares.

With bases in New York City and San Francisco, AppHub offers a tool bringing together more than twenty applications to drive growth for merchants operating on platforms such as Shopify, Magento and WooCommerce.

The buy was fuelled by a $60m investment from Silversmith Capital Partners and is the largest of AppHub's eight acquisitions to date. Leicester, UK-based Reviews.io was founded in 2012 by Callum McKeefery and Nicole Albano as a customer review platform, and has since evolved to offer solutions leveraging first-party data to help positively influence purchase behavior. It now also has offices in Berlin, Sydney & Irvine (CA).

AppHub says it believes there are significant opportunities to accelerate Reviews.io's growth by leveraging its own broad customer base, multi-product offering and value-add services.

McKeefery, who joins the AppHub Board, says of the deal: 'Ecommerce has become incredibly crowded, forcing brands to compete more aggressively than ever for customer attention. When we started REVIEWS.io 10 years ago, we wanted to create a product that would allow brands to build trust with their customers by enabling direct, useful feedback. AppHub is a great partner for us because of their broad ecommerce expertise and customer footprint, which will enable us to further accelerate growth'.

Arjun Batra, co-founder and co-CEO of AppHub, says the combined platform 'addresses a range of pain points for ecommerce businesses, including marketing, conversion, logistics, and now reviews, making it well positioned to serve both SMB and enterprise customers'. Kris Eng, also co-founder and co-CEO, comments: 'In addition to adding a great product, the acquisition of REVIEWS.io is transformational for us because it doubles our headcount to c.100 employees and expands our footprint to better serve our growing global customer base'.

Batra and Eng revealed the price tag exclusively to web site www.axios.com .

The firms are online at www.apphub.com and www.reviews.io .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.