Ceros acquired by Crowd Fusion

The move was driven by Crowd Fusion’s bid to expand into content marketing and the company has confirmed that it will rebrand as Ceros.

As part of the deal, Crowd Fusion chief executive Brian Alvey is to step aside to become chief scientist, while current Ceros chief executive and co-founder Simon Berg will become chief executive of the newly restructured company.

Crowd Fusion's Craig Wood is to continue in his role as chief technical officer while Ceros co-founder and chief commercial officer Paul Fifield will become chief revenue officer.

Ceros, whose clients include Virgin Atlantic, Lego and Nescafe, was founded in 2006 by North London-headquartered pre-media business FMG as an online magazine production, distribution and auditing tool to provide publishers with the same business model they expect from printed titles.

Former FMG chief executive Simon Berg stepped down from his role in January to take on the role of chief executive at Ceros and to drive its worldwide growth.

Berg’s move followed the $20m sale of the former family-owned FMG Group to a group of private equity investors led by India Value Fund Advisors (IVFA) in March 2011.

Crowd Fusion, which was founded in 2007 by Alvey and Wood, hosts popular sites including the US website TMZ and News Corp’s tablet-only publication The Daily.

Alvey said: "By acquiring Ceros, we’ve accelerated our plans to productise our leading cloud-based CMS technology in the content marketing space.

"As a brand, Ceros is synonymous with interactive content marketing and it is indicative of our intentions that we have also chosen to rebrand Crowd Fusion as Ceros."