Ardian Acquires Majority Stake in Assist Digital
Ardian, the independent private equity investment company headquartered in Paris, has signed a binding agreement to acquire a 60% majority stake in Assist Digital, the pan-European provider of CX services and technologies.
Progressio SGR, the private equity firm that serves investors and entrepreneurs in Italy, will divest its minority stake in Assist Digital, but the firm’s management team will reinvest strongly alongside new partner Ardian, maintaining the remaining 40% stake. Italian bank BNL and its parent, the French international bank BNP Paribas, minority shareholders alongside Progressio, will also reinvest in Assist Digital.
Partnering with Ardian will not only enable Assist Digital to accelerate the implementation of its international expansion strategy, which will include mergers and acquisitions, but will also allow Assist Digital to benefit from Ardian’s wide network of contacts. Ardian will support Assist Digital by continuing to invest in innovation and technology, while enhancing managerial continuity and the company’s ability to attract new talent.
Sprout Social Acquires Repustate
Social media management software provider Sprout Social is acquiring Repustate, a specialist in sentiment analysis and natural language processing (NLP). Financial terms of the transaction were not available, but the acquisition will enable Sprout to harness the AI domain expertise of Repustate to increase the power, breadth, and automation of Sprout’s own competencies in social listening, messaging, and customer care.
Sentiment analysis and AI are key to managing social media at scale, Sprout executives say, and adding Repustate to the mix is expected to accelerate the technology roadmap across core Sprout products in social listening and social customer care efforts. The technology investments being made to integrate the offerings from both companies will start paying off beginning next year, providing an upside to medium-term growth goals.
Both companies were founded in 2010. Chicago-based Sprout Social offers solutions in deep social media listening and analytics, social management, customer care, commerce, and advocacy to more than 34,000 brands and agencies worldwide. Toronto, Canada-based Repustate uses AI-powered semantic technology to model sentiment analysis, text analytics, and enterprise search solutions, reading and analyzing text and video content natively, and transforming data through NLP, AI, and machine learning (ML) into business intelligence.
MessageGears Acquires Mobile Marketing Leader Swrve
Customer engagement firm MessageGears has acquired mobile app marketing company Swrve. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed, but the acquisition follows a $62 million growth-funding announcement for MessageGears that positions the Atlanta-based provider as the preeminent cross-channel solution for large business-to-consumer (B2C) brands.
The MessageGears platform enables enterprise marketers to leverage zero- and first-party data to engage with their customers in highly personalized ways across email, SMS, and mobile apps. Unlike most CX enterprise solutions, MessageGears accesses the data repositories of brands directly, instead of relying on cloud data syncs, eliminating latency, inflexibility, and other limitations typical of many other marketing clouds and customer engagement platforms. For its part, Swrve is a key player in helping enterprise brands deliver native, 1-to-1 personalized experiences inside their mobile apps, including mobile push, in-app, and embedded content.
With the acquisition of Swrve, MessageGears will be able to help enterprise brands reach and engage customers across the full spectrum of digital channels, covering email, SMS, in-app, mobile push, web, and TV. The acquisition will also bring the data-connected approach of the newly enlarged organization to a larger and more global audience across the US and Europe.
Thoma Bravo and Sunstone Partners Complete Acquisition of UserTesting
Investment firms Thoma Bravo and Sunstone Partners have completed the acquisition of UserTesting, the San Francisco-based provider of a video-first experience testing platform, in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $1.3 billion. The agreement to be acquired was announced on October 27, 2022, and was approved by UserTesting stockholders at a special meeting of its stockholders on January 10, 2023.
Related Article: Medallia to Be Acquired by Investment Firm Thoma Bravo
With the completion of the transaction, UserTesting stockholders were to receive $7.50 per share in cash for each share that they owned of UserTesting common stock, which has ceased trading and is being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). UserTesting will be combined with UserZoom, a company in which Thoma Bravo had acquired majority control in April 2022. UserTesting’s CEO, Andy MacMillan, will lead the combined company.
UserTesting obtains insights from customers with fast, opt-in feedback and experience-capture technology. The UserTesting Human Insight Platform taps into a global network of real people and generates video-based recorded experiences, enabling anyone in an organization to ask questions directly, hear what users say, see what they mean, and understand what it is like to be a customer. Unlike approaches that track user behavior and then try to infer what the behavior means, UserTesting reduces guesswork and brings CX data to life with human insight.
Invenna Merges with Human Inference
Invenna, the Dutch-based provider of a customer data platform (CDP), is merging with Human Inference, a specialist in master data management (MDM) solutions, to become the first entity in the Benelux region to offer a platform combining a CDP with MDM technology.
Invenna’s CDP technology focuses on accessing, merging, applying, and monitoring customer data for clients in various sectors, including finance, media, retail, charities, and automotive. Human Inference, on the other hand, provides software solutions for data quality through natural language processing, fuzzy logic techniques, and a matching pattern-recognition engine.
Related Article: Tealium Report: Customer Data Platforms Now Indispensable to Business
With the merger comes an integrated business solution that can continuously recognize customers and their data, offering new possibilities for organizations that range from simplifying the IT landscape to minimizing business risk.
CDPs and MDMs are two popular technologies for resolving the persistent problem of bad customer data, but there are important differences between the two. CDPs streamline data across multiple sources, unifying a company’s customer data from marketing and other channels, synchronizing sources and destinations. In comparison, MDMs collect data from multiple sources and then validate the data to create a reliable data source.
Author Information
Alex is responsible for writing about trends and changes that are impacting the customer experience market. He had served as Principal Editor at Village Intelligence, a Los Angeles-based consultancy on technology impacting healthcare and healthcare-related industries. Alex was also Associate Director for Content Management at Omdia and Informa Tech, where he produced white papers, executive summaries, market insights, blogs, and other key content assets. His areas of coverage spanned the sectors grouped under the technology vertical, including semiconductors, smart technologies, enterprise & IT, media, displays, mobile, power, healthcare, China research, industrial and IoT, automotive, and transformative technologies.
At IHS Markit, he was Managing Editor of the company’s flagship IHS Quarterly, covering aerospace & defense, economics & country risk, chemicals, oil & gas, and other IHS verticals. He was Principal Editor of analyst output at iSuppli Corp. and Managing Editor of Market Watch, a fortnightly newsletter highlighting significant analyst report findings for pitching to the media. He started his career in writing as an Editor-Reporter for The Associated Press.
