Enterprise social media management company Sprinklr has acquired social data analytics and services firm Dachis Group for an undisclosed sum, the latest venture from Razorfish’s cofounder and former CEO Jeff Dachis.
As a combined entity, Sprinklr, founded in 2009, and Dachis Group will employ 300 with offices in New York, London, and Austin, and serve more than 400 brands. Although Dachis will assume a role as advisor for the company as a result of the acquisition, he will be pursuing other ventures, as well.
“We’re always [considering a] three-year roadmap and we noticed that a bunch of clients were using Dachis Group for brand analytics, content optimization and employee advocacy, and when Jeff and I connected, we realized our vision for the future was the same and the products were complementary, so it made sense to come together,” Ragy Thomas, CEO of Sprinklr, told AdExchanger.
Sprinklr, which recently raised a $17.5 million round in Series C funding in November, says it’s seeking to build the most comprehensive social relationship infrastructure for brands and enterprises.
Unsurprisingly, it’s up against a range of competitors, including Gigya, which is constructing a Connected Consumer Management Suite and recently grabbed $25 million worth of new funding, on up to the enterprise platform players like Salesforce.com and Oracle, which have been actively snapping up social analytics startups to pad out marketing clouds in recent years.
But this, according to Thomas, is where Sprinklr is differentiated.
“Our software…can provide a unified context of the consumer based on the experience of the consumer,” he claimed. The problem, he says, with comprehensive enterprise cloud offerings “is the consumer doesn’t want to wait 20 minutes or an hour or a day until you get the data from your customer care cloud for your brand to realize that you should market to them because you need to. You really have to fundamentally rethink enterprise software” from the consumer’s vantage point.
The deal suggests what a difference a few years can make in the social marketing space. Salesforce.com acquired Buddy Media for $689 million in 2012, and while the purchase price for Dachis wasn’t disclosed, Sprinklr has raised only about $37.5 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
Between 2010 and 2011 Dachis Group scooped up several standalone social media startups, including Powered, Archrival, and StepChange Group.
Its technology includes a Real-Time Marketing Engine, which determines trending topics among target audiences, and then optimizes messaging to engage the consumer on the fly, will be layered in with Sprinklr’s content, campaign and reporting capabilities.
Although the initial focus was on earned media, Sprinklr, Thomas said, will launch a paid social module in the coming month; it is currently being beta tested with a client.
“The beauty of paid integrated with social is you can amplify things that are working,” Thomas said. “There’s all this talk about content marketing, but content is only one component of social marketing. There’s data, context, connections, insights…and I think it will continue to evolve.”
Sprinkr’s business, thus far has been split about 90-10 for brand and agency usage of its platforms. Dachis has leaned more heavily toward agency usage, with approximately 40% of its customer base consisting of agency users, which Sprinklr and Dachis feel are an “underserved” population in the enterprise software technology landscape.
“Digital and technology and the impact it’s having on marketing are crucial and an exponentially greater value driver for big agency conglomerates,” Dachis said. “That was clear in the [Publicis-Omnicom merger news] and also when you look at where WPP is going. Those businesses will continue to buy, incubate and build their way into this transformation and I think they’ve got enough staying power and wherewithal to navigate the transition.
