Location intelligence and advertising platform Taptap Digital has acquired Manchester-based audience design company Skyrise, in a deal aimed at deepening its European presence and accelerating international growth, including an eventual move into the US market.
The acquisition brings together Taptap’s location intelligence and omnichannel activation technology with Skyrise’s privacy-first audience design tools, which are built on deterministic data and proprietary modelling rather than cookies or personal identifiers. The combined business will pitch itself as a cookie-less alternative for advertisers looking to identify, activate and measure audiences across channels.
Skyrise will continue to operate under its own brand, with existing client relationships, delivery teams and its DSP, SSP and media owner partnerships remaining in place. CEO Paul Barnard, who has led Skyrise since 2023, stays on alongside the current management team. Founders Ian Vint, Michelle Vint and Alex Petrie are exiting the business as part of the deal.
The move follows two years of rapid expansion for Madrid-headquartered Taptap, which has entered Brazil, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy and the MENA region during that period, alongside building out its UK operations. With Skyrise now part of the group, Taptap says 70% of its total revenue is generated across European and other international markets, excluding Latin America — a notable shift for a company that built its early market leadership in Spain and LATAM.
Taptap frames the deal as part of a broader push into AI-driven advertising infrastructure, pointing to tools it has built for audience planning, campaign optimisation across CTV, programmatic digital out-of-home (prDOOH), desktop, mobile and audio, and real-time measurement, alongside a wider rollout of agentic AI capabilities across its operations.
Álvaro Mayol, partner and CEO of Taptap Digital, said the deal reflects a shift in advertising toward pairing deeper audience intelligence with more autonomous execution, adding that it strengthens the company’s UK position and lays groundwork for further growth across EMEA and, eventually, the US. Barnard said the move would let Skyrise scale its audience design approach globally, citing Taptap’s engineering resources and international footprint.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
