Exclusive: Cint goes private after steep valuation drop
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Patrick Comer. Photo: Courtesy of Cint
Cint is going private at less than a tenth of the roughly $3 billion valuation it commanded five years ago as the 28-year-old business continues its turnaround, CEO Patrick Comer exclusively tells Axios.
Why it matters: The move comes amid a broader shift across the media measurement industry, with Nielsen and IAS going private and DoubleVerify set to join them if its sale to Nielsen closes.
Driving the news: Cint, a research tech platform that connects companies with survey respondents around the world, on Tuesday completed its acquisition by a consortium led by private equity firm Triton Partners.
- Cint shares stopped trading on Aug. 7 on the Nasdaq Stockholm, which it joined in 2021. The deal values Cint's outstanding shares at roughly 2.1 billion Swedish krona, or less than $300 million.
- Triton's offer was at a 42.5% premium to Cint's closing share price on April 24, the last day of trading before the deal was announced.
Flashback: Comer founded research technology company Lucid before selling it to Cint for roughly $1.1 billion in 2021.
- Comer became Cint's chairman after the acquisition and returned to an operating role as CEO in September 2024 to help turn around the company.
The big picture: Part of that decline reflects a broader collapse in some tech valuations since their 2021 peak. But Comer was blunt about Cint's own struggles.
- "We fumbled the merger and the execution of the business over a number of years," Comer says. "The take-private is literally the signal that that era is over, and now we're starting to build the future again."
- Private ownership will give Cint more flexibility to invest more freely in talent and products and manage fewer competing priorities than it faced as a Swedish public company, Comer says.
- Comer says the market wasn't seeing the growth in Cint's measurement business while worrying about whether the exchange side would recover. Media measurement sales grew 22.8% on a constant-currency basis in the first quarter, the company reported in April.
State of play: Cint is the latest media measurement company to leave public markets.
- Nielsen was taken private in 2022 by an investor group led by Elliott Investment Management's Evergreen Coast Capital and Brookfield Business Partners in a roughly $16 billion deal.
- Integral Ad Science was acquired by private equity firm Novacap for roughly $1.9 billion last year.
- Nielsen recently struck a deal to acquire DoubleVerify for around $2.15 billion.
What to watch: AI is making Cint's core proposition more valuable.
- "The difference between an AI slop response versus a verified human response, the value is so vastly different," Comer says.
- Cint is investing in fraud detection to distinguish real survey respondents from bots and using AI to help customers analyze measurement data.
- AI also creates a new market for Cint as discovery moves into chatbots, where traditional signals used to attribute purchases can disappear.
Go deeper: Media measurement moves private
