Founded in 2016 by former ad exec Christy Laurence, Plann was named Startup Daily’s Startup of the Year. She left her corporate job after suffering a brain injury. Initially told told she would never recover, she defied the experts and went on to launch Plann.
The deal brings a complementary suite of social media tools to both companies and builds out Linktree’s product suite. It gives users the ability plan and auto-post on social media sites such as TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram. Plann also has an AI-powered caption generator among its features.
Laurence quipped that her 8-year-old business is “100 in startup years” in announcing the deal on Linkedin, saying she met Linktree founder Alex Zaccaria in its very early days “and loved his identical passion for our space, endless ideas for bootstrapping, and bonded over world-class product experiences as we built our businesses”.
Plann has around 3 million customers globally in more than 160 countries as well as staff around the world. Laurence said “Linktree was an easy decision to call my new home” and will continue to run the company under its new owners.
“With Linktree’s global reach, scale, and innovative technology, combined with our team’s expertise in social media scheduling, I cannot wait to continue helping those running online businesses of every kind succeed in ways we could only dream of before,” she said.
She thanked her team for their efforts saying “may this be the sweetest validation of what we’ve always known, that what you do has always been worthy of the world stage.”
In a statement to customers, Plann said “for the time being, nothing will change” adding that there are no changes to the company’s roadmap or development priorities.
“We’re sticking to our current focus to continue delivering the features and improvements you’re used to,” the business said.
“While we’re always exploring new ways to enhance the platform, any future changes will be made carefully, with your needs in mind. We’ll keep you updated along the way.”
Plann users will become Linktree customers when the integration is complete.
Alex Zaccaria, Linktree’s CEO, was equally enthused about the deal, saying there’s “lots more to come on why this makes so much sense, but for now we’re excited to welcome the team and get stuck into integration”.
“Outside of Canva and Leonardo.Ai (which I am also very stoked about!), Aussies partnering with Aussies is rare and I’m super proud to be a part of the Australian tech ecosystem,” he said.
Plann is Linktree’s fourth acquisition, having acquired two-year-old competitor Koji for an undisclosed sum in December last year before shutting it down a month later.
In early 2023, the company snapped up Sequoia-backed European link-in-bio startup Bento, at the same time it cut 27% of its ANZ workforce. Its first acquisition was automated music link aggregation platform Odesli in 2021.
Linktree has been profitable since launch in 2016 and bootstrapped until 2020, raising capital for the first time with a $15 million Series A in October that year. VC got additional slices of the startup in two further raises – $59 million raised in March 2021 and $152 million in March 2022.
The platform now has around 50 million users.
Startup Daily contacted Plann and Linktree for comment but has not yet had a response.
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