Mode Buys JibJab for Up to $29.5 Million in Data Roll-Up Push

Mode is paying up to $29.5 million in cash and stock for JibJab, the e-card and video company best remembered for a viral video from the 2004 Bush-Kerry election. It's Mode's 11th acquisition since January 2025 and its largest this year.

JibJab is profitable and generates tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue, according to Dan Novaes, Mode's cofounder and CEO. Mode plans to plug the brand into EarnOS, its rewards and monetization system, though the specifics haven't been worked out yet, Novaes says.

Mode's model is straightforwardly transactional: users who opt in to share data with businesses doing consumer research — or, more recently, training AI models — get access to premium app subscriptions and other rewards. Novaes says the idea came from a hard number: only about 5% of app users typically pay for premium subscriptions.

What does Mode actually ask users to do?

"We thought to ourselves, could we provide a rewards and earning exchange amongst consumers to get the premium version of the product," Novaes says. "If you don't want to spend $40 a year on a subscription, then if you take this action, we will give you a light version of the subscription for free."

The actions vary by app. Mode's games can capture user interactions to train AI on tasks. Apps can also prompt users to perform particular actions — like filming themselves doing real-world activities to gather robot training data — in exchange for rewards. Novaes insists users will always have to opt in, and he draws a sharp line against how AI labs have operated so far.

"These AI labs have essentially sucked up the entire internet," Novaes says. "And most of that data was done in a way that you know consumers didn't necessarily opt in."

The trade isn't new. Dial-up-era providers like NetZero offered free internet access in exchange for ads and surveys, and supermarket loyalty programs run on the same logic. What's changed is scale: near-universal smartphones with cameras and location sensors have multiplied what's monetizable.

How does JibJab fit into the portfolio?

Mode has been buying steadily, and each acquisition extends the data machine:

• Trimbox, an email unsubscribe tool, will soon offer an enhanced free version that gathers anonymized purchase data from users' inboxes. "Through EarnOS, users will be able to opt in to share consented inbox and purchase data in exchange for rewards, generating the anonymized, aggregated signals that data buyers increasingly seek to build and refine AI and analytics models," Mode announced in June.
• TLDL, an app that transcribes lectures into study materials for students — a new audience for Mode.
• Smart Cleaner and Easy Clean, which remove duplicate photos and other clutter from phones.
• Orchard Insights, a consumer research firm that tests marketing concepts through online ad experiments.

Orchard Insights is the outlier. "That one actually kind of deviates a little bit from the average model, because we tend to focus on consumer products or consumer apps," Novaes says. "That one's more of a strategic acquisition, just given the nature of the end buyers that we are ultimately targeting for these data insights." The plan is to combine Orchard's research data with behavioral signals from Mode's other businesses.

Novaes says the company follows privacy laws including Europe's GDPR and the California Consumer Privacy Act, a relevant point given how much of Mode's portfolio touches sensitive material like inboxes and photo libraries.

Is the roll-up strategy working?

The numbers say yes, with caveats. Mode claims more than 100 million active users across its businesses and has raised more than $120 million from more than 65,000 investors under the SEC's Regulation A+. Novaes says 2025 was Mode's first profitable year "on a pro forma basis."

The company's dealmaking has drawn scrutiny before. In late 2025, Mode acquired NGL, an anonymous messaging app popular with teens and college students. NGL had settled with the Federal Trade Commission in 2024 over billing practices and allegedly fake, machine-generated messages the FTC said pushed people into subscriptions.

Novaes says AI cuts both ways in the roll-up model: it helps Mode integrate EarnOS into newly acquired products quickly, and it's part of why brand roll-ups have become more common industry-wide. "One of the benefits of this model is that you can see so many different companies, and then you learn these playbooks that work within one product that you can apply in another," he says.

The next phase is scale. "We're starting to go up in the scale of our acquisitions," Novaes says. "What we've noticed internally is it's the same amount of energy to acquire a product that's maybe producing half a million dollars a year in profits to a product that's producing 5 or 10 or 15, so that's something that we'll start focusing more deeply on." A $29.5 million JibJab check suggests that shift has already started.