On Tuesday, church and nonprofit donation platform Pushpay announced its plans to acquire video streaming company Resi Media. Pushpay revealed that it was paying $150 million for the streaming startup in a combination of cash and Pushpay stock. The deal is expected to close next month.
This is a big move for both companies, and makes sense given Pushpay’s recent growth. Pushpay was founded in 2011 with the mission to make donating money as easy as buying a song on iTunes (remember, iTunes was huge in 2011). But over the course of the next few years, Pushpay evolved to become one of the leading payment processing platforms for nonprofits and charities.
Churches, who were looking to process donations from their members, represented a large portion of the company’s customer base, which led Pushpay to build more software solutions geared toward them. Then when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, churches needed to close their doors to in-person gatherings. As a result, these churches relied on Pushpay’s digital services to not only process payments, but also to keep church members engaged and involved in the church.
This led to massive growth for the company in 2020 and 2021. When Pushpay CEO Molly Matthews caught up with Built In in May, she described how people helped one another during this difficult time through donations to their churches and communities.
“It was really incredible seeing how generous people were being to their church communities in a time of crisis,” Matthews told Built In. “We could see that, when stimulus checks came through, people were tithing with those checks. [On the flip side,] as people were losing jobs or unable to pay rent, our churches stepped up, donated and cared for thousands if not millions of people throughout this last year. You could see people really coming together and donating to those causes through our customer organizations.”
Pushpay processed $6.9 billion in transactions in 2020, which was a 39 percent jump from the year before, and, in turn, led to a 39 percent increase in the company’s revenue. This gave Pushpay the fuel to grow rapidly, hire new teammates and build new solutions to serve their customers.
That’s where Resi Media comes in. Resi has built a tech platform that delivers live end-to-end streaming. Resi now serves over 3,900 customers, which includes for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations and — importantly — churches. Resi actually counts over 70 percent of the Outreach top U.S. 100 churches as customers.
Through this acquisition, Pushpay plans to incorporate Resi’s streaming technology into its platform, so its customers can leverage streaming as a way to engage church members. The companies point out that many churches and pastors had to rely on streaming or digital video in 2020 to communicate with members. Even as some churches return to in-person services, the companies believe that streaming will play a role in the future of churches, and they want to build the tech solutions to make this possible.
“Digital tools like live streaming enable organizations to reach and engage stakeholders in an efficient and cost-effective way, regardless of geographical location, providing greater audience potential and revenue opportunities,” Pushpay CEO Matthews said in a statement. “Coming together with Resi Media not only provides our customers access to world-class streaming technology today, but in time will enable Pushpay to deliver a unified solution for digital giving, ministry management, media and more.”
“This is not only an opportunity to align two mission-driven organizations, but also to build on the momentum that Resi has already generated by offering the highest quality and most reliable live streaming services on the market,” Resi Media CEO Paul Martel added. “Joining forces with Pushpay propels our ability to deliver seamless solutions which empower organizations to engage, monetize and grow online, in-person and hybrid audiences at scale.”
