The American company Piano bought a Ukrainian startup Newzmate

The American company Piano Software, which develops solutions for the media business, has acquired the Ukrainian company Newzmate. The amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

The content automation service for marketing and media business, developed by Newzmate, will be one of the solutions of the Piano product line and will be called Piano ESP. And the startup office in Kyiv will become the Ukrainian representation of Piano.

“Over the past year and a half, we have been discussing the possibility of selling with three companies, two in the United States, and one in Singapore,” – said Alexey Chapko, the CEO and co-founder of Newzmate. “We chose Piano primarily because we agreed on the understanding of the market, product vision, values ​​and processes.”

Co-founder and CEO of startup Alexei Chapko will head the Ukrainian Piano office in Kiev as a general manager and take the position of Piano’s vice president of sales in Eastern Europe and Asia. CTO and co-founder of Newzmate Dmitry Shandyba will take the position of Lead Architect Piano and continue to lead the development of the product.

Newzmate employees remain in the Ukrainian Piano office. At the time of the transaction in October of this year, the team included 9 employees, now there are already 12 of them, and in 2019 it is planned to expand to at least 30 people. First of all, they will recruit developers.

Newzmate is a Ukrainian-Polish startup, a SaaS platform for automating content marketing for news and media companies, it was founded by Ukrainians Alexei Chapko (CEO) and Dmytro Shandyba (CTO). The startup has attracted a total of $850,000 investment from Happy Farm, Xevin Investments, Basa Godska, Alexander Bariah and Microsoft Bizspark. The main office with a team of 12 people is located in Kyiv. At the time of the transaction, the solution was used by more than 60 online media in 10 countries in America, Europe, Asia and Africa with a total audience of 300 million readers. Earlier on AIN.UA there was the story of the creation of Newzmate, which at that time already served publications with an audience of 14 million readers.

Piano is a digital content monetization and audience management platform for international media companies. Piano’s customers include NBC Universal, Business Insider, Bloomberg, AOL, Gatehouse, Hearst and more than 1,300 other media outlets.