Daily deal land grabs not over, Bownty acquires Southern European competitor

    It’s been a while since we’ve written about the great Groupon-esque land grabs and wars that seemed to take over the early part of the ’10s. As Groupon started becomming an everyday noun in the U.S., Europe was battling over who could become the regional champion with enough eyeballs to dominate the ‘75% off spa packages’ space.

    An interesting competitor that played the game a little differently was Denmark’s Bownty – a startup that played aggregator to all the smaller Groupon-style companies in the market, and brought all their deals under one roof. What Kayak was to airlines, Bownty was to Denmark’s and the region’s Groupons.

    Just like what we saw with the Groupon-style companies, we’re seeing with the aggregators, with Bownty now acquiring Yunait, a southern European competitor.

    Steffen W. Frølund, the founder of Bownty says,“We are building the Kayak.com for deals on experiences. The experience economy and online2offline commerce is really beginning to gain traction. With the acquisition we expect an acceleration of our growth and we think that Yunait is the perfect match for Bownty in our effort to conquer this space.”

    The two heads of the company, Bownty’s Frølund and Yunait’s Pablo Elosua met briefly in London at a conference, and after realizing how complementary each others’ business was, they decided to enter a content exchange partnership, which eventually ended up with this acquisition. The financial details of the acquisition were not announced.

    More than half a million experiences are booked yearly on the two sites. This represents around €20M in annual sales. Bownty is now looking to double that figure during the next 12 months. “Size is key in our category so joining forces was an obvious move, especially when working in complementary markets,” says Elosua.