Jan de Jong sold his Croatian company Webpower Adria

Dutch entrepreneur with a Croatian address Jan de Jong has sold his company Webpower Adria for email marketing to the Dutch Spotler group, which is also engaged in marketing. This is the third acquisition by the Spotler group in the last month, after it acquired the event application UpVisit and the customer data platform Hive Marketing Cloud.

As de Jong confirmed to Lider, negotiations for the acquisition began earlier this year, and this acquisition ‘makes a lot of sense considering that Webpower Adria had already been selling SaaS solutions owned by Spotler’.

– Our partnership has been strong for the last nine years. The company Webpower Adria has been growing rapidly every year, serving around 250 clients across the region, making it an interesting target for acquisition for Spotler – explained de Jong, without disclosing the financial value of the transaction.

In an official statement from the Spotler group, they stated that Webpower ‘has consistently demonstrated a deep understanding of the local market’ and built a ‘solid reputation’.

– Their strong sales team and broad customer base provide Spotler with a strategic foothold in the Eastern European region and unlock new growth potential – the Group’s statement adds.

New products in the Croatian market

Webpower was founded by de Jong in 2016, together with Boris Turkić and the late Matо Božić, and in 2021, long-time director Martina Šepić joined the ownership structure of the company. Since last year, the director of the company has been Alen Ćorković.

The company operated in the Croatian market as a local partner of the Dutch Webpower, and in 2024 it achieved 1.2 million euros in revenue and a profit of 365 thousand euros. Webpower Adria is known in Croatia, among other things, for being one of the few companies that offers employees a four-day work week.

– Since Spotler has many different products, such as a CRM system, customer data platforms, messaging solutions, and much more, it is reasonable to expect that Spotler will make strong efforts in the future to offer these products in our region – to existing clients as well as potential clients. Until now, Webpower Adria has primarily focused on offering email marketing and marketing automation solutions, but after joining Spotler, its service portfolio will quickly grow – explains de Jong.

Although Webpower has been renamed to Spotler MailPro with this acquisition, de Jong emphasizes that the company’s structure remains as it is after the acquisition: Ćorković remains as director, while Šepić and he withdraw from operational management of the company and focus on further business development.

– We believe that Alen, together with the management team from the Netherlands, will take this company to an even higher level – de Jong states.

A new company already established

De Jong is, among other things, a co-founder and president of the Association of Digital Nomads in Croatia, at whose initiative the Croatian Government launched the digital nomad visa project in 2021. He came to Croatia in 2006 as a student, and since then he has launched several companies in Croatia. In addition to Webpower, which he has now sold, he also owns the agrotechnology company CROP Croatia, which he founded in 2020 with Jerko Trogrlić, director of the PR agency Vajt.

Simultaneously with the sale of Webpower Adria, de Jong, together with Šepić, founded the company Remote Team Adria, which employs developers and designers in Croatia and connects them with projects from domestic and foreign clients. Their first client, as de Jong highlighted for Poslovni dnevnik, is the Spotler group.