‘We are looking more now’: The Trade Desk is eyeing the M&A aisle

For a company whose deal record fits on an index card, that’s quite the admission.

The Trade Desk has announced two acquisitions since its 2016 IPO. It bought Adbrain, a London-based identity resolution company, in October 2017. Sincera, a New York ad data startup The Trade Desk had already backed through its venture arm, followed in January 2025. AdExchanger reported a third deal in between, though the target was never named. Terms of the Sincera deal weren’t disclosed either. The Trade Desk’s cash flow statement shows $4.35 million spent on a business acquisition in the first nine months of 2025, the window in which Sincera closed.

Neither announced deal set off a spending spree and Green went out of his way to keep it that way. Weeks after the Sincera news broke, he used his slot at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting to squash talk of a new acquisition strategy. Sincera’s team was small, he told the room, before steering the conversation back to the tech The Trade Desk builds itself. Nearly two years on, the M&A philosophy is officially unchanged. The amount of looking is not.  

“We do not ever want to lose sight of the opportunity in front of us and do not want to get distracted through M&A, but at the same time recognize that that can help accelerate us,” said Green. “We are always looking.”

What those targets are, Green declined to say. Most of his answer went on the bar that a deal would have to cleared, which he said is higher than it has ever been. In other words, anything the company bought would have to fit the turnaround already underway. 

“It is also critical to take away that our standards are also higher than ever,” Green continued. “The reason why our standards are higher than ever is we have an opportunity to execute and accelerate our growth with all the changes that we have made in our business. I would never want to derail that by making our 17th priority our number one priority simply because we bought a company. By being super focused on the things that we look at and hold that acquisition standard to a very high level, we think we create the clearest opportunities ahead.

If The Trade Desk was ever going to break the habit of a lifetime, now would be the time. Revenue has gone backwards for the first time since the IPO, its guidance for the fourth quarter sits about 11% below last year’s and Amazon continues to eat into its share of the market. Green has spent the year rebuilding from the inside with updates to the buying platform, a tighter focus on measurement and a 15% workforce cut. But building alone hasn’t fixed the business fast enough and critics have spent months pointing to holes a purchase could plug, from its own identity data to retail transaction signals.

The money to fill those gaps is already in the bank. The company ended the third quarter with $1.23 billion in cash and cash equivalents, plus another $420 million in short-term investments with no debt on its balance sheet.