On its earnings call last week, TechTarget announced its latest acquisition, Xtelligent Healthcare Media, a Boston-based firm with a similar content model to TechTarget.  It has over 1.5 million healthcare-related visitors per quarter across ten websites.  Content focuses on healthcare-related software and technology decisions, aligning with TechTarget’s enterprise software focus but in an adjacent market. Xtelligent topics include telehealth, healthcare analytics, revenue cycle management, healthcare IT security, and electronic health records.

“The healthcare IT market is one of the most important vertical technology markets and a natural adjacency for TechTarget to expand into. This acquisition checks all of the boxes for us.  Xtelligent has an original content model with a permission-based audience of registered members and a large amount of first-party purchase intent data.”

CEO Michael Cotoia in TechTarget’s Q2 2021 Letter to Shareholders

Similar to BrightTALK, Xtelligent did not have a solution for disseminating its intent data, but TechTarget will create new purchase intent segments and feed them into Priority Engine, expanding Priority Engine’s potential user base.

Xtelligent CEO, Sean Brooks, is a former TechTarget VP who founded Xtelligent a decade ago.  Brooks will continue to run the business.  Cotoia noted that Brooks built Xtelligent with a similar opted-in, permission-based audience model.

“We are very excited to join TechTarget and extend our combined audiences and offerings into new markets,” said Brooks. “TechTarget’s experience and success with first-party data, combined with their deep understanding of the B2B Media & Data space, will help us continue to grow and offer customers new opportunities to reach and engage highly targeted healthcare technology decision-makers.”

“[Healthcare] is a vertical that we’ve been keeping our eye on for a couple of years and the adjacent vertical where healthcare intersects with IT and infrastructure, security, hardware, and software, just made all the sense in the world to us. We believe it’s going to open the door to new customers [and] opportunities….We believe that we have an untapped revenue opportunity with Priority Engine and bringing our purchase intent data onto the Xtelligent community.”

TechTarget is eyeing other adjacent verticals, including FinTech and Asset Management, where BrightTALK has some penetration.

TechTarget paid $25 million in cash for Xtelligent, which includes an additional $5 million earn-out.