Five AI Tuck-Ins That Closed This Week
Five AI tuck-ins announced in a single week across completely different categories. Same playbook, different applications.
Carta acquires Avantia - Carta — the ERP for investors, acquired Avantia, a team of 10-15 practicing solicitors operating an AI-driven legal services platform. The acquisition, announced May 12th, has been rebranded as Carta Law. The strategic logic: embed an AI-native legal and compliance layer with an agentic workflow engine called “AVA” directly into Carta’s ERP platform, unifying fund operations and legal work in a single place. This is Carta’s fourth acquisition since October and their first AI-native legal play. It also doubles as an international move — Avantia is UK-based, so this deal likely adds some geo-specific capabilites as well.
MoonPay acquires Dawn Labs Dawn Labs was maybe 10 people, founded in 2025 by solo founder Niraj Prasad. Looks like an acqui-hire. Dawn built AI agents for autonomous trading on prediction markets, and the acquisition gave MoonPay an AI-native trading tool called the Dawn CLI that converts natural language into executable trading strategy. Think of it as a prompt window that knows your portfolio and can execute complex plays through natural language rather than manual order entry.
Celonis acquires Ikigai Labs Announced May 12th. Celonis has 3,800 employees and $1.7B in funding. Ikigai Labs is an MIT spin-out with about 120 employees. Devavrat Shah, co-founder, is an MIT AI professor who is joining Celonis as Chief Scientist. Its other co-founder, Vinayak Ramesh will become Field CTO. The MIT connection matters operationally: MIT’s becomes a shareholder of Celonis as part of the deal, and MIT’s technology licensing infrastructure — which has historically generated significant royalty income on foundational technologies — comes along as a strategic asset. This is partly an acquisition of world-class AI research talent, partly a technology licensing play.
Nominal acquires Fid Labs Announced April 30th. Nominal has 150 employees and $155M raised. Fid Labs had about five employees and $1.7M raised. Fid Labs built AI agents that connected directly to dev environments, simulators, and physical hardware. Nominal builds hardware data infrastructure. The two pieces fit together cleanly: AI intelligence layer on top of the hardware data foundation.
Coupa acquires Rossum Coupa — the Thoma Bravo-backed spend management platform — acquired Rossum, which had built a proprietary transaction large language model for intelligent document processing. The acquisition completes Coupa’s source-to-pay stack by adding the document ingestion layer — the piece that reads, interprets, and routes invoices, purchase orders, and contracts before they hit the workflow. This is Coupa’s third acquisition in 12 months after Scoutbee and Cirtuo. The pattern is a private equity platform systematically assembling the complete spend management stack one capability at a time.
Across all five: Acqui-hire or highly targeted capability acquisitions. Smaller teams. Specific technical problems solved rather than general capability added. Speed over scale. This is how established companies are buying AI competency rather than building it — and it’s happening across every category simultaneously.
Deal #1: Brands at Work acquires Chorus
On May 11th, Brands at Work — a London-based creative comms agency founded in 2010 by Karen Kaden and John Berger — acquired Chorus, a London-based experiential and creative agency known for work with Johnnie Walker, Montblanc, and the Callan Group.
Brands at Work operates in complex B2B — Deloitte, Novartis, BT Group — running internal communications and employee engagement programs. Chorus operates in consumer-facing experiential and live brand activation for luxury brands. They’re complementary in capability and contrasting in customer base, which is exactly the right shape for an independent agency combination.
The stated rationale from Karen Kaden: bringing the two agencies together closes the gap between strategy and creative and creates a more connected offer across internal B2B and consumer activation at scale. Chorus will continue to operate under its own name and leadership, with MD Cassidy staying on, while relocating to Brands at Work’s London Bridge offices.
Terms weren’t disclosed and there was no banker involved. Two founders at a table deciding they’re better together.
Why this matters beyond the deal itself:
Experiential has shifted. Pre-COVID, live and experiential was discretionary — brands allocated leftover budget to it. Post-COVID, it’s a core component of brand strategy, not a nice-to-have. We saw this theme when we covered Eagle Tree’s secondary buyout of Opus earlier this year. The Brands at Work / Chorus deal is the independent agency version of the same conviction — two founders who see where spending is going and are building toward it on their own terms.
The independent agency combination is undervalued as a strategic move. You don’t need PE backing to broaden your capability base. You don’t need always need a banker to find the right partner. You need clarity on what you each have, what you each need, and enough trust to figure out the economics.
Deal #2: Smartly finalizes acquisition of INCRMNTAL
The LOI was signed in March. Seven weeks later, it’s closed. Smartly — the Providence Equity-backed AI advertising platform headquartered in New York and Helsinki — has finalized its acquisition of INCRMNTAL, an AI-powered incrementality measurement platform founded in Tel Aviv by Maor Sadka and Moti Tal.
Smartly’s business, for context: one of the most sophisticated autonomous media deployment platforms in the market. They manage approximately $7 billion in media spend. Their platform can take the work of ten people and compress it to three — intelligent deployment across video, social, and programmatic channels at scale.
The gap they were filling: measurement. You can deploy media autonomously at scale, but the next question every client asks is whether it’s working. Not last-click attribution, not vanity metrics — genuine incrementality. What would have happened without this campaign? That’s the question INCRMNTAL was built to answer.
INCRMNTAL’s approach uses causal measurement that doesn’t require user-level tracking — which is increasingly important as privacy regulations tighten and third-party cookie deprecation continues. The acquisition adds an always-on measurement layer that connects creative and media decisions to actual business outcomes in real time.
Laura Desmond, Smartly CEO, framed it cleanly: combining INCRMNTAL’s real-time incrementality insights with Smartly’s creative and media platform lets marketers connect business outcomes to optimization in real time. The measurement layer tells the platform what’s actually working. That closes the loop.
INCRMNTAL was a 25-person team that raised $5.5M total across two rounds — $1.4M pre-seed from Mobile Day and 2Day Ventures in 2020, and $4M later with participation from Play Ventures and Hercules Capital. Israel continues to punch well above its weight in ad tech and measurement technology.
This is Smartly’s third acquisition under Providence Equity’s ownership, following adlib.io and Viralspace. Providence took a stake at $221M in 2019.
Congratulations to Maor Sadka and Moti Tal, and to Tomi Räisänen, Head of Strategic Planning and Corporate Development at Smartly, for getting this one across the line.
Deal #3: OpAd Media acquires Broad Agency
This one Ayelet has been tracking from the inside — and it’s the deal of the week for culture, chemistry, and what independent agency M&A can look like when it’s done right.
On May 8th, OpAd Media — a New York-based, women-owned media planning and buying agency run by CEO and President Chelsea Derrico — acquired Broad Agency, a 100% women-owned strategy and creative shop founded in 2021 in Philadelphia by Kristen Sachs and Hannah Dillon.
OpAd is approximately 47 people, focused on government, public health, and higher education. Broad is smaller — a Philly-based creative shop known for brand strategy work with clients like Hungryroot, Project Bread, and Catalyte.
The combination: OpAd has always been a media-first agency. Bringing Broad into the fold adds the strategy and creative capability that makes the media work itself better — more connected, more responsive, closer to the brand thinking that informs smart media decisions.
No financial advisor was disclosed. What was disclosed, in Ayelet’s telling, is the whole story:
Carrie Kerpen — who has appeared on this podcast — was the connector. She knew OpAd was quietly exploring M&A without announcing it publicly. She knew the Broad team. She made the introduction with intention, knowing the culture fit was there before the first conversation happened.
The first meeting between Chelsea and Paige (OpAd) and Kristen and Hannah (Broad) was at a dinner. Ayelet was at the table. The chemistry was immediate. Weeks later, all four were at dinner in Chicago the week after closing — aligned, energized, and moving forward together.
This deal is a near-perfect mirror of the Brands at Work / Chorus deal that opened this week’s review. Two independent deals, different markets, same thesis: founder-owned independents combining on their own terms, betting on integrated operating models, and proving you don’t need a holdco’s blessing or a PE sponsor’s capital to build something bigger.
Both deals also share a subtext that’s worth naming: the holdco fragmentation pitch — “let us own you and you’ll have access to capabilities you can’t build yourself” — is losing credibility with independent agency founders who are increasingly finding those capabilities through peer relationships and creative deal structures instead.
Congratulations to Chelsea, Paige, Kristen, Hannah, and Carrie. More women in M&A. More deals like this one.
What’s Coming
The Accenture story is still in progress. We’ll have it when we have it.
Episode 60 — M&A Truths Nobody Tells Founders with Brenda Jacobsen of STS Capital — is live on YouTube, Apple, and everywhere you listen. Fifty minutes of the most practical advice we’ve heard on exit readiness in a long time.
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