On August 22, 2023, Mather Economics LLC ("Mather") announced that it had acquired Sophi, Inc. ("Sophi"), an AI-powered solution for the modern newsroom. Mather is a subsidiary of Mediahuis. Sophi was a subsidiary of The Globe and Mail.
Mather, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, is a global leader in strategic advisory for subscriber yield management, digital product pricing, and content analytics. The company's mission is to enable publisher sustainability and profitability in an industry that requires change to survive and succeed. With this acquisition, the breadth of Mather's capabilities (advisory, managed services, and technology) combines with the depth of Sophi's products (automation software) to provide a full suite of products to help our collective customers meet their urgent business transformation challenges.
Sophi's technology was developed by The Globe and Mail to help newsrooms optimize their most important strategic and tactical content decisions. The Sophi platform provides a suite of artificial intelligence and machine learning-powered automation, optimization and prediction tools built to enable subscriber growth, paywall optimization, and digital content curation and automation.
Gowling WLG acted as Canadian counsel to Mather with respect to this acquisition, supporting Mather's US counsel, Morris Manning & Martin, LLP. The Gowling WLG team included Duncan Snyder and Michelle Kumar (corporate/M&A), Paul Carenza (tax), Ian Macdonald and Elad Gafni (competition), Andrew Bratt (employment), Jim Longwell (IP), Jasmine Samra (privacy) and Daniel Hayhurst (pensions).