Razorfish Inc will announce today (Monday) that it is joining forces with Spray Interactive, a 160 person web design and systems integration firm headquartered in Sweden. New York-based Razorfish, which started out in web design but now describes its business as strategic digital communications, is one of the more notable success stories to have emerged from Silicon Alley. It has established branch offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and London. The merger with Spray almost doubles the company’s size, adding another 160 staff to its existing headcount of 182 and raising revenues by $15m to between $35m and $40m a year. The combined firm will take the Razorfish name. Spray is probably the most similar company to us in Northern Europe, Peter Seidler, chief creative director for Razorfish in New York, told ComputerWire on Friday. In addition to its web smarts, the Swedish firm has a strong systems integration business and has sourced more than 100 of its staff from traditional IT backgrounds. We see this kind of business as a hybrid, supplying everything from web branding to IT strategy, Seidler says. Spray clients include SAS, Star Lines, Scandia, Electrolux, Ericsson, Nokia and the Red Cross. Razorfish itself has been an active company of late. Last week it announced that it had acquired Los Angeles-based media for an undisclosed sum, adding NASA, Intel, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Jim Henson Productions and Urban Decay Cosmetics to an increasingly impressive customer fold.
