The world’s leading distributor is no longer content with selling products, and wants to sell audiences.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which cites sources close to the matter, Walmart is preparing to acquire the French company Vibe.co for around 1.4 billion dollars, or nearly 1.2 billion euros. The transaction would include a payment of $1.2 billion to shareholders as well as an earn-out of approximately $180 million intended to retain key executives after the transaction.
The announcement comes two years after the acquisition of Vizio for $2.3 billion. At first glance this is a new acquisition in adtech, in reality Walmart is pursuing a much more ambitious strategy aimed at building an advertising business capable of rivaling that of Amazon.
Because the battle between the retail giants is no longer played out only on the shelves, warehouses or delivery times, but is played out on the screens.
Walmart wants to become a media group
By leveraging the browsing and purchasing data of hundreds of millions of consumers, Amazon has built one of the most profitable advertising businesses in the global marketplace. Amazon Ads today generates tens of billions of dollars in annual revenue and constitutes one of the group’s most profitable engines.
Faced with this development, Walmart has gradually built its own platform, Walmart Connect.
The objective is simple: transform its customers’ transactional data into advertising inventory. Every search, every purchase, and every consumer behavior can become an actionable business signal for brands.
The problem is that Amazon has a considerable advantage: its advertising ecosystem already covers e-commerce, video streaming, connected TVs and a significant portion of American digital consumption.
Walmart needed to expand its playing field.
Why connected television has become strategic
Connected television is today one of the most coveted markets in the advertising industry. A trend which is primarily driven by uses. Streaming now accounts for nearly 45% of the television audience in the United States, surpassing traditional channels and cable combined. Advertising budgets are gradually following this migration.
Furthermore, advertisers are faced with another phenomenon: the saturation of historical channels. Acquisition costs are increasing on social networks and competition is intense on Google. De facto, brands are looking for new growth spaces. Connected television appears to be a credible alternative, because it combines the power of traditional television with the targeting and measurement capabilities of digital technology.
It is precisely on this promise that Vibe has built its development.
Created in 2022 between Paris and New York by Arthur Querou and Franck Tetzlaff, the company aims to make advertising purchasing on connected television as simple as a campaign on Meta or Google.
Its platform allows advertisers to launch, manage and measure their campaigns from a single interface, with a strong automation and artificial intelligence component.
A second success story
Arthur Querou is not his first entrepreneurial adventure; before Vibe, he co-founded KMTX, an adtech company acquired by Seedtag. Rather than continuing to operate a profitable business, the founders chose to start from scratch.
Pauline Roux, partner at Elaia and historical investor in the company, summarizes this decision:
“Selling a profitable business to start from scratch with intellectual property and little start-up capital was bold. »
This decision appears today as the real starting point of the Walmart operation.
The founders’ conviction was that connected television would experience an evolution comparable to that experienced by search and then social networks: moving from an exhibition media to a performance media.
A trajectory that attracted Walmart
The other determining element is the speed of execution, in 2025, Vibe announced that it would have crossed the threshold of $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR).
According to information from FW.MEDIA from a source close to the matter, the company has now reached approximately $250 million in ARR and is targeting $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by 2027.
A growth that few companies founded in Europe, Pauline Roux also mentions growth multiplied by three from one year to the next, without any notable slowdown.
This dynamic sheds light on the timing of the operation; Walmart is not buying a mature company that has reached its growth ceiling, but a company that still boasts strong acceleration.
What Walmart Really Buys
Technology is only part of the equation, the strategic interest lies in the combination between several assets. On the one hand, Walmart has some of the richest transactional data in the American market; every day, millions of purchases pass through its stores and platforms.
On the other hand, Vizio brings an access point to American homes through connected televisions and their operating system. Vibe completes this set with a software layer allowing you to manage advertising campaigns, automate their distribution and measure their performance.
Thus, a brand will be able to broadcast an advertisement on a connected television, monitor the consumer’s exposure and then measure the impact of this campaign on sales made at Walmart.
For twenty years, advertisers have wanted to directly link advertising to the transaction. The convergence of Vibe, Vizio and Walmart Connect brings Walmart closer to this promise.
