There weren't signs anything was amiss at MediaMath's rooftop space overlooking the Croisette promenade at the Cannes Lions festival in France this past June.
But behind the scenes, MediaMath CEO Neil Nguyen had barely been sleeping, according to three people familiar with the matter. It has about $165 million in outstanding loans. About 300 MediaMath employees have lost their jobs as the company winds down the business. "MediaMath was and is a rare bright spot of not just smart, talented people, but principled and good human beings," said MediaMath's founder and former CEO Joe Zawadzki in his first interview about the company since its board pushed him out in December 2021."I'm very sad that it just didn't get to where it could have gone and shocked that it went down this way at the end.
A former MediaMath client when he worked at the media agency Havas, Nguyen had joined the MediaMath board as an advisor in 2021 and"Ultimately, we believed we had a 24-month runway to turn the company around," Nguyen said in an emailed statement."Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. We needed an additional capital infusion in early 2023."Nguyen had refreshed the leadership team with a new CFO, a new chief technology officer, and new top sales executives.
The publicly traded adtech firms Viant and Zeta Global put forward offers that would have still included a bankruptcy process, people familiar with the matter said. MediaMath feared the bankruptcy process could spook customers and disrupt the company in the short term. Viant didn't respond to requests for comment. Zeta declined to comment.Instead, MediaMath looked to the Swedish investment holding company Media and Games Invest, which initially was willing to avoid bankruptcy court.
MGI's Verve Group, which hosted panels at"Verve Apartment" in Cannes Lions this year, put together an initial offer to acquire MediaMath."You have a business that has its biggest clients in Cannes and on the other side you're balancing trying to get a transaction or a deal done," a person familiar with the matter said."You have to do both: You have to show up because when a deal goes through you still have a revenue target on the other side of the transaction.
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