Machinio, a startup with designs on being the Google of heavy equipment, has been acquired.
Liquidity Services, a company that operates a network of e-commerce marketplaces in more than 500 product categories, says it has paid $20 million for Machinio. The purchase consists of $18 million in cash and another $2 million in restricted stock issued to Machinio’s executives.
Another $5 million could be paid to Machinio should the company reach certain financial targets in 2019.
We profiled Machinio in a piece last year examining the growing landscape of online equipment services. Machinio has offices in Chicago and Berlin and was started in 2013 by co-founders Dmitriy Rokhfeld and Dan Pinto.
Rokhfeld and Pinto built Machinio with the goal of giving heavy equipment buyers a vertical search engine akin to those in other industries like Indeed for jobs, or Kayak, Travelocity and a host of others for travel. Today, Machinio is now capable of aggregating millions of listings from thousands of different sources. The platform has gained quite a bit of attention from investors, including Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers, a minority investor.
According to the Liquidity Services announcement of the acquisition, Machinio currently lists more than 1.2 million assets for sale, valued at more than $25 billion. The site attracts 10 million annual visits from users across 190 countries.
Beyond listing equipment for sale, a major focus for Machinio has become how it works with equipment dealers. In fact, though Machinio’s end users are prospective equipment buyers, the company’s primary clients are dealers.
