Luxoft Acquires U.S. Innovation Agency, Smashing Ideas

Luxoft Holding, Inc (NYSE:LXFT), a global IT service provider, today announced the acquisition of Smashing Ideas, a Seattle-based design and innovation agency.  

Smashing Ideas consults across the product design and development lifecycle, with a focus on accelerating innovation at every stage for their Global 500 clients. Their approach and depth of experience in strategy, design, development, and program management fosters collaboration and enables them to bring new products, services, and businesses to market, faster.

Luxoft purchased Smashing Ideas from Penguin Random House, the world’s largest trade-book publisher, which has owned the company since 2011.

This acquisition bolsters Luxoft’s digital research, strategy, and design capabilities, and illustrates its ongoing commitment to provide valuable expertise to its global clients. It comes at a pivotal time in the industry, when ongoing collaboration among technology, design, and strategy is critical to delivering products as companies look to enhance their user experience, improve their results and ensure market share gains.  

The acquisition expands the range of services both companies can provide, creating a unique market position that accelerates clients through all phases of their lifecycle. The increased depth of capabilities is intended to positively impact each of Luxoft’s lines of business: Digital Enterprise, Financial Services and Automotive, with Smashing Ideas supporting Luxoft’s horizontal digital transformation practice, Luxoft Digital.  

“Our commitment to helping revolutionize the technology offerings of our clients is more evident than ever with our acquisition of Smashing Ideas,” said Dmitry Loschinin, CEO and President of Luxoft. “Luxoft prides itself on being a value-added provider that is focused on technical strategy and implementation. This move further extends our capabilities into design and business strategy, allowing us to provide even more value to our strategic client partners.”

Smashing Ideas CEO, Brian Burke, added, “By joining Luxoft, we are well-positioned to advance our clients’ most ambitious initiatives across the innovation lifecycle. Luxoft’s worldwide presence enables us to collaborate across time zones to service global clients via a multitude of delivery centers. This allows us to bring products to market faster, while Luxoft’s deep technical expertise in blockchain, IoT, and machine learning amplifies the enterprise scale we can provide. Together, we look forward to being a true innovation partner to our clients’ organizations.”

“Penguin Random House and Smashing Ideas have enjoyed a long and productive working relationship. While we have continued to work together on several exciting digital product experiences, we believe that moving forward, Smashing Ideas, and its exceptionally talented strategists, designers, developers and program managers, will be best served by an owner that can contribute more synergies and added value for shared clients.  We believe Smashing Ideas and Luxoft are a perfect fit, and we wish them enormous success together,” said Nina von Moltke, President, Director of Strategic Development, Penguin Random House U.S.

GP Bullhound acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Penguin Random House and Smashing Ideas on this transaction.