Madrid-headquartered Taptap Digital has bought Manchester adtech firm Skyrise, with founders Ian Vint, Michelle Vint and Alex Petrie exiting the business three years after they merged Regital and Skyrise Intelligence. Terms were not disclosed.
Skyrise sells privacy-first audience design: tools that let advertisers identify, activate and measure audiences without relying on cookies or personal identifiers. Taptap Digital runs an AI-driven location intelligence platform, and is positioning the deal as adding audience discovery to its geo-contextual data stack.
The business in its current form dates to 2023, when Ian and Michelle Vint — a husband-and-wife team — combined Regital with Alex Petrie's Skyrise Intelligence. Paul Barnard was appointed chief executive that year and has run the company since.
The cap-table outcome is a clean break for the three founders. All exit at completion. Barnard stays on as chief executive alongside the existing management team, and Skyrise will continue to trade under its own brand inside the Taptap group rather than being folded into the buyer.
Neither consideration, earn-out structure nor any rollover equity for management was disclosed. Taptap has not said how the purchase is being funded.
For the North West, it is another instance of a Manchester-built platform being acquired by an overseas strategic buyer rather than scaling through a domestic growth round — the same pattern of foreign capital taking out regional adtech and martech assets at the point where they need international distribution.
Taptap's own trajectory explains the appetite. The company has paired organic operations in the UK and Brazil with market entries into Germany, the Netherlands and Italy over the past two years, plus partnerships in Ireland, South Africa and, most recently, the MENA region. North America is the stated next step.
Álvaro Mayol, partner and chief executive of Taptap Digital, said the combination targets connected TV and programmatic digital out-of-home in particular, and that the transaction strengthens the group's UK position while building a platform for growth across EMEA and eventually the US.
Barnard said joining Taptap allows Skyrise to scale its audience design methodology globally, citing the buyer's engineering depth, international footprint and AI infrastructure.
The strategic logic is straightforward: cookie deprecation has made identifier-free audience modelling a scarce capability, and buyers with distribution are paying to acquire it rather than build it. What the UK ecosystem does not learn from this deal is the price — and without disclosed consideration, the returns to the founders and to Skyrise's backers stay private.
Original source: BusinessCloud — https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/madrid-swoop-for-manchesters-skyrise-sees-founders-exit/
