CDP Relay42 Bought by Supermetrics: The Embedded CDP Trend Continues

After a flurry of CDP acquisitions in January, things had been quiet on that front – until this morning, when we learned that Relay42 is being purchased by Supermetrics. The deal reverses the pattern of earlier CDP acquisitions, which had been been by customer-facing companies in content management (Contentstack/Lytics), customer service agents (Uniphore/ActionIQ), and ecommerce (Rokt/mParticle). Earlier CDP acquistions had also largely involved customer-facing businesses such as retail marketing (Bloomreach/Exponea), email (Sitecore/Boxever) and messaging (Twilio/Segment). But bear in mind that Relay42 is what we call a campaign CDP, meaning it offers journey orchestration, personalization, and outbound campaigns, as well as advanced analytics and AI agents. So the underlying logic is the same: vendors want to provide both data assembly and activation. While other acquisitions added a CDP’s data assembly capabilities to an existing activation system, Relay 42 adds activation to Supermetrics data assembly. Either way, you end up with a combination of both.

The trend towards embedded CDPs is now so clearly visible that it’s barely worth a mention. A more interesting question might be why Relay42 chose to sell itself at this moment: after all, as a bona fide CDP, it already had data assembly features similar to what Supermetrics provides. I suspect the answer here is brutally simple: money. Despite having an excellent product and marque accounts, Relay42 has struggled in recent years, dropping (per LinkedIn) from 69 employees in June 2023 to 50 as of June 2025. Over that same period, Supermetrics has grown a relatively modest 12% but, more important, its total headcount is now 407. At eight times the size of Relay42, Supermetrics provides the financial resources and customer base to power future growth. Without additional resources, Relay42 would have been hard-pressed to continue to develop its product, let alone make the sales and marketing investments needed to expand.

I had intended to write a longer post this week expanding on the trend towards embedded CDPs. I even had a nifty graphic prepared to illustrate the changes. (Actually, I prepared it for a workshop I’m giving in July at the Vibe Marketing Tech Fest in Manchester, UK, if you'd like to attend.) But plenty has already been written on this topic and I’m not sure a more detailed exploration would add much value. The only point I haven’t already made is that the trend towards integrated customer data/activation systems runs counter to the trend towards assembling systems from separate components. At the risk of being boring, I’ll mildly suggest that both will find some takers. What the Relay42 deal does illustrate is that small, independent CDPs will find it very hard in the future to compete outside of niche markets.