Adobe bought Russian-based SEO company Semrush for $1.9 billion
Adobe has acquired Russian-founded marketing software company Semrush, Adobe’s first major acquisition since the failed Figma deal in 2022.
Adobe has acquired Russian-founded marketing software company Semrush, Adobe’s first major acquisition since the failed Figma deal in 2022.
According to the deal, Semrush was valued at $12 per share, and the total amount of the acquisition, which will be completed in the first half of 2026, is estimated at $1.9 billion. This will be Adobe’s third-largest acquisition after the acquisition of Marketo for about $4.75 billion in 2018 and Macromedia for about $3.4 billion in 2005, Bloomberg reports.
Semrush was founded in 2008 by Russians Dmitry Melnikov and Oleg Schegolev in 2008. The service allows companies to conduct SEO audits, analyze and optimize their online marketing, including how a brand appears in search results using artificial intelligence.
In 2017, Semrush had about 400 employees in offices in the United States, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, and Russia. In April 2018, the company received $40 million in investment and in 2021 held an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Semrush is currently based in Boston, USA.
«After a full-scale invasion, the Russian-origin service does not accept payments from users from Russia. But in general, you can continue to work on the platform from the territory of Russia, it allows you to monitor other sites according to various parameters, the only tool that was blocked was the SemRush Sensor,» the Svidomo project reported .
The acquisition of Semrush will help Adobe offer «a comprehensive solution that gives marketers a holistic understanding of how their brands are performing across native channels, LLM, traditional search, and the web at large,» the company said in an announcement.
Adobe, best known for software used by artists and designers like Photoshop, also offers a suite of marketing and analytics tools that are increasingly making the company money. But Adobe shares have fallen this year on concerns that advances in artificial intelligence will undermine the company’s core business.
On the back of the acquisition news, Semrush shares rose 75% to a record high of $11.83, while Adobe shares fell 2,2%.
Recall that in 2022 it became known about Adobe’s intention to acquire Figma, which worried users who used the service. In December 2023, the companies jointly announced the mutual termination of the merger agreement, under which Adobe was to pay the Figma product design platform $20 billion. Figma’s compensation from Adobe amounted to $1 billion.
In the summer of 2025, Figma went public on the New York Stock Exchange, where its shares reached $115.50 at the end of the day — three times more than the initial offering price of $33. This gave Figma’s market capitalization a whopping $67.7 billion.
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