Walmart buys Vibe.co for $1.4bn to chase Amazon in ads

Walmart is paying a reported $1.4bn for a connected-TV ad startup worth $410m nine months ago. The price tells you how far retailers will now go to catch Amazon in advertising.

Walmart has agreed to buy Vibe.co, a connected-TV advertising platform. Two reports peg the deal at $1.4bn. It would be the retailer’s biggest acquisition in two years. The target is small. The ambition is not.

On Tuesday, Walmart said it would acquire Vibe.co, a self-serve platform for streaming TV ads. It is built for small and mid-sized businesses that want to buy and measure those ads themselves. Walmart did not disclose terms. But the Wall Street Journal and The Information both put the price at $1.4bn.

The Information reported that the figure includes a $180m executive retention payment.

The multiple, not the headline

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The number worth pausing on is not the price. It is the multiple. Investors valued Vibe.co at $410m as recently as last September. Walmart is paying more than three times that nine months later, according to The Information. By its estimate, the deal values Vibe.co at about 12.6 times revenue. The listed rival MNTN, by contrast, trades at roughly one times expected revenue.

That gap is the real story. It shows how hard retailers now compete for the plumbing behind retail media. A company can raise money at one valuation in the autumn. It can sell for three times more by summer. The reason is simple: the buyer needs what it owns. Walmart is not paying for Vibe.co’s current sales. It is paying to control a piece of how streaming ads reach buyers.

What Vibe.co does

French entrepreneurs Arthur Querou and Franck Tetzlaff founded Vibe.co. They set out to make streaming TV ads as easy to run as paid social. The platform handles self-serve activation, targeting, ad creation and measurement. It targets the smaller advertisers that national TV has long priced out.

The startup now serves more than 10,000 advertisers. “We unlocked Performance TV. Now it’s time to make it as big as Search and Social,” Querou wrote on LinkedIn after the deal. He and Tetzlaff will join Walmart Connect once the transaction closes.

The Amazon problem

Walmart Connect is the retailer’s commerce-media arm. It is also the clearest sign of where Walmart wants to grow. Advertising is a high-margin business bolted onto one built on thin margins. Every new advertiser Walmart reaches is profit it does not have to squeeze out of groceries.

Vibe.co slots into a wider build-out. Walmart bought TV maker Vizio two years ago to own more screens to sell against. It has since struck deals with Magnite, Yahoo DSP and Google DV360. Ryan Mayward, who runs Walmart Connect in the US, framed the logic plainly. The unit, he said, is “focused on making commerce media more accessible, more measurable and easier to activate for advertisers of all sizes”.

Walmart’s pitch to advertisers rests on closed-loop measurement. It can tie an ad shown on a screen to a purchase rung up in a store or on its site. Few rivals can promise the same. It is also turning Vizio into a content business.

The retailer plans shopping-themed video series fronted by celebrities and influencers, another way to sell ads against screens it controls. Vibe.co adds the missing piece: a simple way for small advertisers to actually buy into all of it.

The target is Amazon. It has turned its retail data into one of the fastest-growing ad businesses in tech. That business is worth tens of billions of dollars a year. Walmart, with fiscal-2026 revenue of $713bn, has the scale to compete.

What it has lacked is Amazon’s advertising machine. Vibe.co is meant to help close that gap, above all among the marketplace sellers and local brands that Amazon already courts.

A familiar European exit

For Europe, the deal has a familiar shape. A startup with French founders set out to challenge the incumbents. It now ends up inside a US giant rather than scaling on its own.

Vibe.co operates from New York, and the Wall Street Journal described it as a French ad-tech firm. Either way, the value it created will compound under Walmart, not under a European owner.

Querou framed the sale as an accelerator rather than an ending. “This is not the finish line for us,” he wrote. That may hold true for the founders. On the wider question of where Europe’s best ad-tech talent builds, the answer here is the usual one: across the Atlantic.

The deal still has to clear the Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust waiting period. Walmart expects it to close by the end of its 2027 fiscal year, and says it will not dent existing guidance. The open question is bigger than this one deal.

Can retail-media multiples like 12.6 times revenue hold, or has Walmart just marked the top of a very hot market?