In keeping with our mission to provide comprehensive advertising analysis, MediaRadar puts together a report of the most important mergers and acquisitions news each week. Stay in the loop, whether you sell advertising space or focus on business development. 

This week, Moody gets more data, VMware boosts its networking tech and UberEats in India sells to a local competitor. 

Moody’s Acquiring Regulatory DataCorp.

Moody’s Corporation has struck a deal to acquire Regulatory DataCorp. (RDC) for $700 million. 

RDC, currently owned by Vista Equity Partners, is a software service built to prevent criminal infiltration of financial systems by providing automated customer screenings. RDC’s Global Regulatory Information Database (GRID) helps companies assess counter-parties through more than 60 risk types across 120,000 global sources. 

In 2017, Moody acquired a similar company data service, Bureau van Dijk. This company published business information and specialized in private company data with its flagship Orbis database. Orbis and GRID compliment each other. 

VMware Expands Networking Tech With Nyansa

VMware, a cloud-computing and virtualization software company, is set to acquire Nyansa. The terms of the deal are not yet disclosed, but is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. 

Nyansa is a company which develops IT infrastructure analytics software and is credited for creating the first cloudsourced vendor-agnostic network analytics platform, Voyance. VMware intends to combine Voyance with their own VeloCloud, a software-defined wide area networking technology (SD-WAN) to provide end-to-end visibility and control capabilities for networks. 

Nyansa currently analyzes customer sites at companies including Tesla, Uber, Lululemon, and Rooms To Go. The deal will mark VMware’s 10th acquisition since 2019. Dell Technologies is a majority shareholder of VMware. 

Zomato Acquiring Uber Eats

Uber has sold its Indian UberEats division to Zomato, a startup platform for restaurant aggregation and food delivery. 

Zomato currently operates in over 500 cities in India and has a global reach throughout several countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Since the beginning of its Indian operations in 2017, UberEats has struggled to establish a competitive customer-base in the Indian market. 

Darshini Kansara, analyst with CARE ratings, states that Indian markets differ from a developed market in terms of price points and strategies. This acquisition will give Zomato an edge over local competitors and may be what gives Zomato the power to dominate its current rival Swiggy.

In Other News

These are some other notable deals and developments from the past week:

• Gryphon Investors, a San Francisco-based private equity firm, has announced its acquisition of Ncontracts. Ncontracts offers enterprise risk management software to over 1,300 U.S. customers in the financial services industry.

• CarGurus has acquired Autolist. With over 28,000 U.S. dealers listed, CarGurus is the most visited automotive shopping website in the U.S.

• Scopely has acquired FoxNext Games from Disney for an estimated unconfirmed price of $250 million. This transaction comes several months after Disney acquired FoxNext as part of its $71 billion deal for 21st Century Fox in March 2019. 

• Private equity firms Stone Point Capital and Further Global have made an agreement to acquire Duff & Phelps, a consulting service for clients that covers a wide-range of areas, such as valuation, corporate finance, investigations, cyber security, compliance and regulatory matters, and other governance-related issues. 

• Fast casual restaurant company Chopt Creative Salad Co. is buying Mexican fast food chain-restaurant Dos Toros Taqueria. The two fast growing New York-based companies will form a new parent company called Founders Table Restaurant Group.

• AI-powered language learning platform Busuu recently announced that it has acquired live video tutoring company Verbling. Integrating Verbling’s tools into Busuu will bolster its offerings and allow it to expand into the live video tutoring space. 

• The Walt Disney Company has decided to drop the word “Fox” from its Twenty-First Century Fox subsidiary. The 20th Century Fox studios will become 20th Century Studios, Fox Searchlight Pictures will become Searchlight Pictures and more name changes will likely follow as well. According to The New York Times, the name change may be a move to prevent consumers from mistaking the Disney owned movie studios as being connected to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News media company.