Saban Brands Adds San Diego’s Zui to its Kid Entertainment Holdings

Zui, KidZui, Zui.com, Saban Brands

Saban Brands, a Los Angeles-based holding company, said today it has acquired San Diego’s Zui, the kid-friendly Internet startup founded in 2008 as KidZui.

The deal includes Zui.com, a search engine for Web content approved for pre-teens, and KidZui, a plug-in Internet browser. Saban said Internet traffic for the combined Web services amounts to about 2.3 million visitors per month, with the average visitor spending almost 30 minutes three times a week.

Financial terms were not disclosed. Zui has raised more than $18 million in venture capital over the past four years. Investors include San Diego’s Mission Ventures, Costella Kirsch, Emergence Capital Partners, First Round Capital, Maveron, and Rose Tech Ventures.

Zui co-founder and CEO Cliff Boro was not available to discuss the deal this morning. In today’s statement, he says, “Zui not only adds capabilities to the Saban Brands portfolio, but also provides unbelievable talent and capabilities in the areas of engineering, product development, and digital entertainment.” Saban Brands, which plans to keep the Zui office in San Diego, said the deal includes 12 Zui employees.

Saban Brands was founded in 2010 by Saban Capital Group, which committed over $500 million in an ambitious plan to acquire a diverse portfolio of media, lifestyle, fashion, celebrity, and consumer brands. The portfolio already includes Vortexx Entertainment Ventures, a block of Saturday morning cartoons; Power Rangers; and the Paul Frank design house, with its youth-oriented Julius-brand of apparel, furnishing, toys, and other products.

Leading Saban Brands’ strategy is Elie Dekel, an entertainment industry veteran in marketing, licensing, and creative services who was tapped to match the success that began with Saban Entertainment’s merger with News Corp’s Fox Kids Network in 1995. Following the acquisition of The Family Channel in 1998, Dekel became president of consumer products for Fox Family Worldwide, which was acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 2001.

In today’s statement, Dekel says the Zui acquisition “allows us to further develop our online offering and deepens our position as a premier provider of kids entertainment across all media.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.