Why Smartsheet (SMAR) Is Buying Brandfolder For $155 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • Aug 24, 2020
  • Smartsheet Inc (NYSE: SMAR) — a company that provides a cloud-based platform that enables teams and organizations to plan, manage, and capture work — announced that it is buying Brandfolder for $155 million. This is why.

Smartsheet Inc (NYSE: SMAR) — a company that provides a cloud-based platform that enables teams and organizations to plan, manage, and capture work — announced that it is buying Brandfolder for $155 million. With this acquisition, Smartsheet will be tapping into an industry that helps marketers with content for campaigns: digital asset management.

This deal will be financed in a combination of cash and stock. And more details about the impact of the deal will be shared when Smartsheet reports its earnings on September 2.

Founded in 2012, Brandfolder’s customers include Lyft, Slack, and Under Armour. And prior to the acquisition, Brandfolder raised over $10 million in funding. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Brandfolder essentially provides a centralized platform to easily organize, discover, control, distribute, and measure all forms of digital content. Plus the company supports the logistics of content management.

And Brandfolder’s capabilities provide insights and analysis on the discoverability and reusability of assets throughout the entire content lifecycle for internal and external stakeholders.

Through Brandfolder, Smartsheet customers will be able to manage, track, and discover all content within their workflows reducing the creation of repetitive assets to drive greater transparency and efficiency. And internal teams will be able to gain insights into their content and make strategic asset decisions with Brandfolder’s performance data features through brand-specific tags that track where the content is being used and how it’s performing. 

This tagging also enables external contributors to easily identify and utilize assets through Brandfolder’s identification and categorization search capabilities.

KEY QUOTES:

“Content is becoming an increasingly central component of any enterprise workflow across a broad range of departments, including marketing, legal, finance, and sales. Brandfolder’s content capabilities coupled with Smartsheet’s powerful workflow and collaboration features will provide teams with a dynamic solution to securely manage, share, and publish their content, empowering cross team and organization collaboration.”

— Mark Mader, CEO of Smartsheet

“Brandfolder has evolved how brands access, manage, and deploy their assets through an intuitive platform, but as work becomes heavily content centric, teams need a way to manage content alongside work. Together, Smartsheet and Brandfolder will give talented teams a dynamic solution to create and discover great content from inception to execution that builds a brand and impacts the bottom line.”

— Luke Beatty, executive chairman and founder of Brandfolder

“Brandfolder gives brands an intuitive platform to easily share, store, and track digital assets and gain insights on those assets to make strategic decisions. The unbeatable combination of Brandfolder and Smartsheet will enable our customers to efficiently track and manage the entire content creation lifecycle from inception to deployment.”

— Steve Baker, President and CEO of Brandfolder