Was Moz About to Exit? Revenue, Funding and Sarah Bird’s 2019 Answer

Moz’s revenue, in its CEO’s own words: in an interview with Nathan Latka recorded in July 2019, Sarah Bird said Moz had finished 2018 “just shy of 60,000,000” in revenue, and that 2019 would come in “north of there, probably like 15%.” The $70 million that has followed this episode around is Nathan’s number. He recast her revenue as a run rate and put the year-end target at “about 70,000,000 run rate”; she answered, “Yeah. That’s that’s the goal.” It was a goal set halfway through 2019, not a figure Moz reported.

The exit question got an equally plain answer. Bird said investors weren’t pressing to cash out, called an IPO unlikely at Moz’s growth rate and, asked whether Moz was in acquisition talks with Vista Equity, said no. She also said Moz had “a lot of conversations ongoing from people who are interested in the business.” Moz was sold less than two years later, in June 2021. That deal came after the interview, and it is covered with its filed numbers at the end.

Moz revenue: her number and Nathan’s

The figure arrived with a correction in the middle of it. Nathan had asked for the previous year’s cash flow or EBITDA, the conversation turned to the current year, and Bird began, “So this year we’re about 60,000,000 in revenue,” before fixing the year: “Last year, were just shy of 60,000,000 revenue, I should say. And this year we’re going to be north of there, probably like 15%. And our EBITDA is gonna be closer to 15% too.”

So her 2018 number is revenue, and it carries a hedge. The 15% growth and the 15% EBITDA margin are both forecasts for 2019, made with nearly half the year still to run.

Nathan then did the conversion that produced the headline. “So 60,000,000 in terms of run rate… you plan to grow to about 70,000,000 run rate by the end of this year. About 10,000,000 in new ARR bookings this year.” Her whole reply was “Yeah. That’s that’s the goal.” The arithmetic is close but not exact: 15% on top of a number just under $60 million lands a little under $69 million. Nathan rounded that to 70 and relabelled her revenue as run rate.

Free cash flow went the same way. Bird’s own statement was qualitative: “We’re EBITDA positive, we’re cashflow positive.” Later she credited cheaper data for part of the improvement: “My EBITDA has grown this year because we are so much better at acquiring data more efficiently.” The $10 million is Nathan’s: “If you’re taking 15% of 70,000,000 to the bottom line or about 10,000,000 a year or about, what is that about $800,000 a month free cash flow?” She allowed it (“there’s variability in there, but yes”), but its inputs are a forecast margin applied to a goal, with EBITDA relabelled as cash flow. The episode went out under the title “$70m ARR and $10m FCF”. Both of those numbers are his.

How her figure sits against Moz’s published numbers

Moz had published its own revenue before. Announcing its Series C in January 2016, Bird wrote that Moz “did about $38 million in revenue for 2015.” Moz’s 2017 year in review, published in March 2018, reported “$47.4 million in GAAP revenue in 2017, an increase of 11% from 2016.” Against that, “just shy of” $60 million for 2018 is a jump of about a quarter in a single year. That was also the year Moz bought STAT Search Analytics, which Bird announced on October 10, 2018, and which she described on the tape as “a company… that is all direct sales.” The interview doesn’t say whether her 2018 figure is GAAP revenue on the same basis as the 2017 report, or how much of it came from STAT.

No actual 2019 revenue figure appears in any source cited here. The last two rows are a forecast and a target, not results.

Funding and ownership: about $30 million raised, and no buyout

Moz’s history page says Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig founded it in 2004 as SEOmoz, and that it took the Moz name in 2013. Bird, who practiced law before Moz, was its COO in 2012: Fishkin’s announcement of that year’s funding round named her to the board. She was CEO at the time of this interview.

Asked how much Moz had raised, she said, “About 30,000,000.” Asked when the last round was, she said, “Oh gosh, what year was our last raise? 2016, think, 2015.” The public record agrees with her on the total and settles the date.

$1.1M + $18M + $10M = $29.1M, the total Xconomy reported on January 29, 2016.

That makes Nathan’s closing recap (“30,000,000 raised last round in 2015”) wrong twice. About $30 million was the total across three rounds, not the last round, and the last round closed in January 2016.

She also explained why nothing had been raised since: the self-serve business paid for growth. In her words, Moz could “use the cash generated from the self-service side of the business to fund the cost of acquisition and for that more stable enterprise customer base, which is why we don’t need funding on the horizon.” The cohort economics behind that claim, from the churn curve to lifetime values and payback, are the subject of our separate write-up of this interview.

Nathan floated the obvious alternative for a profitable company with venture investors: borrow to buy them out, as he said Wistia had done. For Moz, he reckoned, “you’d have to, I don’t know, probably raise like 90,000,000. They want a three X minimum.” That is his arithmetic, roughly three times the money raised. Her answer closed it off: “No, we have not considered that at this time. We’re not really focused on that.”

Was Moz about to exit? What she said in 2019

Nathan pressed next on whether those early investors wanted their money back. Her answer was more careful than a yes or a no:

“No, I wouldn’t say pressure to get liquidity. I mean, business is healthy. The business is stable. I mean, it’s also a great time in market. So I will say it’s a conversation we’re always having.”

She went on: “we have a lot of conversations ongoing from people who are interested in the business and interested in this kind of business.” As attention grew for SEO and for the SMB side of the market, she added, “Moz is on a lot of people’s minds.” Nathan’s read was that Moz now had private-equity buyers’ attention as well as strategic ones. That was his framing. She named no buyer and no process.

Three more answers complete the picture:

• On an IPO: “I don’t think IPO is a likely outcome with the growth rates we’re seeing right now in the market,” and “a financial model that prioritizes cash flow, I think, is a better fit for us.”
• On Vista Equity: asked directly whether Moz was in acquisition talks with the firm, she said no. Asked whether she liked them, she said, “I don’t really know them personally well enough to say, they seem fine, right?”
• On how a buyer would price Moz: Nathan role-played “a big mean private equity firm” that would discount revenue from customers who never activate. She argued that those customers pay to acquire everyone else, and that seeing this “does require investor who looks at this very holistically.”

Taken together, her July 2019 answer to this post’s question was: no talks with Vista, no pressure from investors, no IPO in view, and a standing conversation with interested parties. “Is now a good time?” was, in her phrase, a question that kept coming up.

Since the interview: the 2021 sale to J2 Global’s iContact

Everything in this section happened after the recording and is not on the tape.

On June 4, 2021, Bird announced on Moz’s blog that “Moz has been acquired by iContact Marketing Corp,” describing iContact and its sibling email brands as “a subsidiary of J2 Global (NASDAQ: JCOM).” She was still CEO when she announced it. J2 Global renamed itself Ziff Davis later in 2021. Moz’s about page now says the Moz Group “was formed in 2021 following the acquisition by iContact (a subsidiary of Ziff Davis (NASDAQ: ZD)).” The buyer was not Vista, and the company never went public. It went to the email-marketing unit of a Nasdaq-listed company.

Ziff Davis’s 2021 annual report, filed with the SEC, gives the deal’s numbers. It acquired SEOmoz, the legal entity behind Moz, on June 4, 2021, “at a purchase consideration of $67.0 million, net of cash acquired and assumed liabilities.” It adds that “for the year ended December 31, 2021, SEOmoz contributed $25.6 million to the Company’s revenues”, which covers about seven months of ownership.

Did Moz reach the $70 million goal? None of the sources here says. None reports Moz’s revenue for 2019 or 2020, and the $25.6 million covers only the months of 2021 after the sale.

Bird has since left the company. Moz’s author note on her sale announcement, read in October 2026, describes her as “formerly the CEO of Moz.”

Her figures, with the second each was said, are on the interview page and transcript. Moz’s current record is on its GetLatka profile.