Ben Chestnut has attended a lot of technology conferences in the 20 years since co-founding Atlanta marketing technology giant Mailchimp.
He’d listen to employees from other companies talk about the buzz surrounding cryptocurrency and 3D printing. But the conversations with Intuit Inc. employees made him pause.
“It was always about the plight of small business,” Chestnut told the Business Times' sister paper the Atlanta Business Chronicle. “If you know anything about Mailchimp’s culture here in Atlanta, that’s it. Good people who care about empowering small businesses.”
Those casual conversations led to a phone call last year from Alex Chriss, an Intuit executive who leads its QuickBooks platform, the company's accounting software for small and mid-size businesses.
Months later, it’s no longer just talk.
Mailchimp, self-funded since 2001, has agreed to sell to Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU) for $12 billion, according to a Sept. 13 announcement. It’s considered to be the largest sale of a bootstrapped technology company.
Intuit’s goal is to integrate Mailchimp with QuikBooks and play to each platform's strengths. Mailchimp uses artificial intelligence-driven marketing. QuickBooks has extensive customer data. Combined, they create a technology suite to help small businesses grow.
Inside the deal
The key difference for Mailchimp and QuickBooks customers will be expanded data-sharing between the platforms. QuickBooks has about 4 billion customer records for millions of small businesses, Chriss said. Its data can give better insights about how to market to those customers. QuickBooks budgeting allows business owners to see how much money they have for marketing, while Mailchimp can show them the best way to spend it. Artificial intelligence will allow the companies to automate those processes.
The budgeting integration would have been helpful to Chestnut and Mailchimp co-founder Dan Kurzius when they were just getting the startup off the ground, Chestnut said. The two used QuickBooks to manage their finances in the early days.
Mailchimp began with email marketing solutions, then evolved into marketing automation using artificial intelligence for small businesses. Mailchimp helps Intuit carry out a long-term investment strategy— its evolution into an “AI-driven expert platform,” according to its website.
The acquisition, paid in equal parts cash and Intuit stock, is set to close in January 2022. About $300 million of the sale will be employee bonuses in the form of Intuit stock, according to the transaction details. Mailchimp employees don't hold traditional stock options in the company like other startups, but instead had a profit-sharing model.
'Atlanta as a new hub'
Mailchimp’s happy monkey logo against a bright yellow background isn’t going anywhere, Chestnut said. Its 1,200 employees will join the Intuit umbrella.
The acquisition comes as Mailchimp is gearing up to relocate its headquarters from Atlanta's Ponce City Market to a 300,000-square-foot headquarters on the BeltLine Eastside Trail. Its move to the new at 760 Ralph McGill project should be complete by the end of 2022, Chestnut said.
Deals like the Mailchimp sale add even more fuel to the Atlanta tech ecosystem, which has seen a boom in the last year. Startups are raising more capital than ever before. A record number of investment firms are opening. Big Tech such as Google and Microsoft are expanding their presence in the city.
Mailchimp is an Atlanta success story and an oddity in the technology industry. Unlike most startups, Mailchimp hasn’t raised any outside venture capital. The company had $800 million in revenue in 2020, according to an investor presentation on the acquisition.
Chestnut didn’t set out to become a pioneer. His approach: “I was minding my own darn business trying to serve my customers.”
For Intuit, it’s a chance to get into the Atlanta market, Chriss said.
“We’re excited to invest not only in Mailchimp," he said, "but use Atlanta as a new hub to grow our tech talent."
