Air Marketing Buys Cleverep — Outsourced Outbound Is Buying Targeting, Not Channels
Air Marketing, the Exeter-based outsourced sales development firm, has acquired Barcelona's Cleverep in a deal that gives the UK company an AI-and-email prospecting capability and a foothold in the German-speaking DACH market. The value of the deal was not disclosed, according to TheBusinessDesk, which reported the acquisition on August 16, 2026.
What happened
Air Marketing specialises in phone-led prospecting and outsourced sales development. Cleverep, founded in 2022, built its business around data targeting, AI tooling and email-led prospecting, with a Barcelona-based team serving German, Austrian and Swiss markets. In its own announcement, Air says the combination creates "a stronger, smarter multichannel outbound capability across Europe," pairing Air's calling expertise and operational scale with Cleverep's data, AI, email and DACH-language capability.
"We have always believed in the power of a well-timed, well-handled phone conversation, but the strongest outbound programmes do not live on one channel," said Owen Richards, founder and CEO of Air Marketing. "Cleverep has built something genuinely smart around data, AI and email, and the team understands the DACH market in a way that cannot be replicated from a desk in the UK."
Cleverep's founder framed the deal as two halves of the same problem: "Cleverep brings the data, AI, email expertise and DACH knowledge; Air brings deep calling experience, operational scale and an established UK presence. Together, we can offer something neither business could deliver alone."
Air says existing clients get access to DACH expertise, multilingual campaign capability, "more intelligent data, targeting and prioritisation," and stronger email activity supporting phone-first programmes — without forced changes to current delivery.
Why it matters
Two words in Air's own description of the deal are worth underlining: targeting and prioritisation. A phone-first agency buying a data-and-AI shop is not a story about adding an email channel. It is a story about deciding who to call.
Outsourced sales development has spent a decade competing on activity volume — dials made, emails sent, seats staffed. That model is under pressure from both ends: buyers are harder to reach, and AI has made raw send volume worthless as a differentiator. The agencies adapting are buying the layer that decides which accounts deserve a human touch at all.
This is the same consolidation pattern visible elsewhere in the market this summer, with CRM and revenue platforms acquiring the data and context layers rather than building them. The channel is not the moat. The targeting is.
What it means for in-house teams
If an outsourced provider is buying prioritisation capability, in-house SDR teams should ask what they are prioritising on. Most are still working alphabetical lists out of a CRM, or a static ICP filter that has not been revisited since it was drawn up.
The alternative is working from signals: who engaged with your content, who visited your profile, which accounts suddenly show multiple people paying attention. We covered why that shift is happening in cold outreach vs. warm pipeline in 2026, and how to operationalise it in our LinkedIn engagement-to-pipeline guide.
traxy gives in-house teams the prioritisation layer agencies are now paying to acquire: it tracks who engages with your LinkedIn presence, scores them against your ICP, and hands your reps a ranked list instead of an alphabetical one.
Sources: Air Marketing announcement, TheBusinessDesk