The sale of Datatrics to Italian company Mailup S.p.A. ('MailUp'). MailUp is admitted to trading on the Borsa Italiana's multilateral trading facility AIM Italia / Alternative Investment Market (MAIL.MI) (ISIN IT0005040354).

Datatrics is a start-up company engaged in design, development and exploitation of a predictive marketing application. MailUp is the simple and scalable solution to design, send and automate marketing campaigns via email, text messages and messaging apps.

The consideration due by MailUp was comprised of a cash component on the one hand and an in-kind consideration on the other hand, consisting of newly issued listed shares in MailUp. This made the transaction fairly complex from a logistics and drafting point of view, as the emission of the new shares was obviously governed by Italian law and stock exchange rules but the actual sale and transfer of the Datatrics shares by Dutch law. In addition, rights of minority investors of MailUp had to be taken into account pursuant to the stock exchange rules which constituted also additional challenges for MailUp itself in terms of valuation of the acquisition and contribution of the Datatrics shares to MailUp against the issue of the new shares. The transaction successfully closed on 30 October 2018.

The founder of Datatrics, 24-year-old Bas Nieland, will remain involved in the business for the coming years. The informal investors of Datatrics have taken on an advisory role for the post-merger integration period but will no longer have direct operational involvement. 

Please see the press release issued upon completion of the transaction.

AKD's deal team was led by Laura de Jong and further consisted of Carlos Pita Cao, David Molenaar, Marielle van Winden - Spaans, Monique Verkuilen and Ariänne van Maanen.

In this transaction, AKD closely cooperated with reputable Italian capital markets firm Studio Legale NCTM. 

MailUp engaged Simmons & Simmons LLP as its legal counsel, whereby the deal team was comprised of members of the Amsterdam office and the Milan office of Simmons & Simmons LLP. This firm also acted as the Dutch civil law notary for the transfer of the Datatrics shares.