Taptap Digital Acquires Skyrise to Expand European Footprint & Accelerate Global Expansion
by on 25th Aug 2026 in News
Taptap Digital, the global location intelligence and audience activation platform, today (25th August, 2026) announced the strategic acquisition of Manchester-headquartered audience design platform, Skyrise. The transaction marks a major milestone in Taptap Digital's European growth strategy, creating a uniquely differentiated platform that combines audience design, location intelligence, omnichannel activation, and agentic AI to deliver privacy-first, outcome-driven advertising solutions at global scale.
Skyrise complements Taptap's AI-powered location intelligence platform with one of the UK's most advanced privacy-first audience design capabilities, built on high-quality, deterministic data and proprietary modeling. By integrating these rich data assets with Taptap’s global infrastructure, the combined offering enables advertisers to identify, activate, and measure audiences more effectively without relying on cookies or personal identifiers, delivering deeper insights and stronger business outcomes.
Skyrise will operate under its own brand as part of Taptap Digital, prioritising continuity for its platform, client relationships, and delivery teams. Skyrise audiences will remain available across its existing ecosystem of DSP, SSP and media owner partners, alongside new routes to market through Taptap Digital.
CEO Paul Barnard, who has led the business since 2023, will remain in his role alongside the existing management team. The acquisition will see Skyrise founders Ian Vint, Michelle Vint and Alex Petrie exit the business.
Transforming the revenue mix and global footprint
The acquisition fundamentally transforms Taptap Digital’s revenue mix, further differentiating its omnichannel capabilities and accelerating its CTV strategy globally. Building upon its established market leadership across Spain and Latin America, the integration of Skyrise accelerates the group's diversification, with 70% of total revenues now generated across European and other international markets (excluding LATAM).
This acquisition marks the latest milestone in Taptap's disciplined international expansion strategy. Over the past two years, the company has paired its organic operations in the UK and Brazil with successful entries into Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy, alongside strategic partnerships in Ireland, South Africa, and most recently, the MENA region. This repeatable operational playbook creates a highly scalable platform, strengthening Taptap’s data, technology, and talent as it continues to evaluate and build toward further international expansion, including key growth opportunities in North America.
An AI-powered, intelligence-first architecture
As cookie-less, area-based marketing scales globally, analysing and acting on high-volume geocontextual data requires advanced execution capabilities. To meet this demand, Taptap Digital is built on an AI-driven architecture, automating core programmatic workflows to boost efficiency and precision. Taptap leverages proprietary AI tools directly within its platform, including specialised intelligence for area-based audience planning, dynamic omnichannel campaign optimisation (across CTV, prDOOH, desktop, mobile, and audio), and real-time spatial measurement. In parallel, Taptap is progressively embedding agentic AI capabilities across its technology, operations, and service delivery, evolving how teams plan, activate, optimise, and measure campaigns while preparing the organisation for an increasingly AI-driven future. These capabilities are designed to augment human expertise, increasing the speed, precision, and scalability of its operations to ultimately deliver better, more effective services and outcomes for our clients.
By bringing Skyrise into this ecosystem, Taptap Digital delivers immediate, scalable product and engineering support, a vast global network, and deep infrastructure capabilities to Skyrise’s core proposition, allowing both entities to deliver next-generation, cookie-less solutions at an unprecedented scale.
Álvaro Mayol, partner & CEO of Taptap Digital, commented: "The future of advertising lies in combining deep audience intelligence with increasingly intelligent and autonomous execution to deliver measurable outcomes within a privacy-first ecosystem. By integrating Skyrise’s exceptional audience discovery capabilities into Taptap’s global infrastructure and our evolving AI and agentic capabilities, we are transforming how complex geo-contextual data is understood, activated, and measured at scale."
"Together, we will deliver market-leading omnichannel solutions that drive better outcomes for our clients while accelerating revenue across high-growth programmatic channels, particularly CTV and prDOOH. This transaction also strengthens our position in the UK and establishes a powerful platform for growth across EMEA and, ultimately, the US."
Paul Barnard, CEO of Skyrise, added: "Joining forces with Taptap Digital allows us to rapidly scale our audience design methodology on a truly global stage. Taptap brings world-class engineering depth, an established international footprint, and a highly sophisticated AI infrastructure that will immensely benefit our clients and partners. We are thrilled to collaborate with the Taptap leadership team to steer this next chapter of integrated growth."
Operational continuity and next steps
To ensure a seamless transition, Skyrise clients will benefit from Taptap’s enhanced global relationships, advanced omnichannel solutions, and AI automation tools. Current Skyrise CEO Paul Barnard and the leadership team will remain core to the business, working closely alongside Taptap Digital’s executive team to guide the strategic integration and drive the combined entity’s regional growth.
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