ParTech Beefs Up Its Marketing Mojo With Its Bridg Acquisition

Retail technology provider PAR Technologies Inc. has acquired the Bridg point-of-sale marketing platform from Cardlytics Inc. ParTech expects the move will enable its quick-service restaurants and other customers to activate offers targeted at previously anonymous shoppers and identify which marketing tactics drive consumer spending.

New Hartford, N.Y.-based ParTech is paying Cardlytics 1.81 million of its shares for Bridg in a transaction valued at $27.5 million and potentially up to $30 million, depending on certain conditions. The pending sale was first announced in January.

Atlanta-based Cardlytics operates two major platforms. The bigger one, which accounted for about 95% of the company’s billings in 2025, is a marketing system for financial institutions that uses anonymized POS purchase data and enables merchants to provide offers to consumers through banks’ online and mobile apps.

In contrast, customers of the Bridg platform are merchants that provided Cardlytics with access to their POS data, including product-level purchase data, for analysis to drive further sales. Bridg was founded in 2012 and acquired by Cardlytics in 2021.

Besides restaurants, ParTech has customers in the convenience-store and travel-and-entertainment sectors. “Bridg’s proprietary Identity Resolution (IDR) platform converts in‑store transactions into enriched customer profiles, uncovering previously unknown shoppers and integrating them into a brand’s first‑party data set,” ParTech said in a statement when the planned sale was announced. “The acquisition is expected to bring immediate differentiated value to the PAR platform, creating one of the industry’s first unified data sets that combines loyalty and non‑loyalty transactions.”

Cardlytics, which is highly dependent on a few large customers, especially J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Wells Fargo Inc., has been struggling with declining sales in recent years. Consolidated revenues in 2025 were $233.3 million, down from $278.3 million in 2024 and $309.2 million in 2023, according to a company financial report. Cardlytics said it will use the equity from the sale to pay down debt and strengthen its balance sheet.

“The completion of this transaction marks an important milestone for Cardlytics,” chief executive Amit Gupta said in a statement announcing the closing of the sale Tuesday. “With the sale of the Bridg assets, we are further simplifying our operating model and concentrating more heavily on scaling our core Cardlytics platform—the area where we believe we have a distinct competitive advantage and a clear path to long-term value creation.”