(Nov 19): Adobe Inc has agreed to buy the marketing software company Semrush Holdings Inc for US$1.9 billion, marking its first takeover announcement since the failed US$20 billion acquisition of Figma Inc in 2022.
The all-cash deal will value Semrush at US$12 per share and is expected to close in the first half of 2026, Adobe said in a statement on Wednesday. The takeover would be Adobe’s third-largest, after it bought Marketo for around US$4.75 billion in 2018 and Macromedia for about US$3.4 billion in 2005.
The announcement sent shares of Semrush surging as much as 75% to a record US$11.83 after markets opened in New York, their biggest intraday gain since the company went public in March 2021. Adobe’s stock declined as much as 2.2%.
Semrush is a platform that allows businesses to analyse and optimise their online marketing, including how their company appears in artificial intelligence (AI) search results. Acquiring the company will help Adobe offer “a comprehensive solution that gives marketers a holistic understanding of how their brands appear across owned channels, LLMs, traditional search and the wider web,” the company said in the statement.
Best known for the software that creative workers use such as Photoshop, Adobe also offers a suite of marketing and analytics tools, which has been generating an increasing amount of revenue for the company. Still, Adobe’s stock has struggled this year over concerns that advancements in AI will undermine the company’s core business. It has lost about a quarter of its value this year through Tuesday’s close.
The Wall Street Journal first reported that a deal was nearing.
See also: Nokia streamlines business to focus on AI infrastructure boom
Adobe walked away from its proposed acquisition of Figma in 2023 after clashing with regulators in Europe and the UK. The acquisition would have been one of the largest takeovers ever of a private software maker.
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