Salesforce just bought a startup for 'tens of millions of dollars' adding to its buying spree
According to Dow Jones Business News, Salesforce just acquired a data automation startup called Implisit Insights for "tens of millions" of dollars, citing people familiar with the matter. Implisit Insights, based in Israel, has raised $3.3 million in funding so far, according to Crunchbase.
Salesforce declined to comment on the deal.
Implisit Insights is a software maker that helps sales people make faster and better decisions based on the data stored in its customer database. It could predict the best possible deals and identify those most at risk of losing, while providing recommended actions to improve the sales process, according to its website.
Its cofounders have an interesting background too: Elad Donsky, now its CTO, started college at 15, while Gilad Raichshtain, now its CEO, started working at Intel when he was 16, becoming its youngest engineer at the time.
Salesforce has been accelerating its pace of dealmaking this year. Implisit Insights would be its third acquisition of the year, following the purchase of two other data intelligence startups, PredictionIO and MetaMind. It's worth noting Salesforce made 5 deals in all of last year, while only 1 acquisition the year before that. Salesforce has roughly $2.7 billion in cash and cash equivalents, based on its latest filings.
Data-driven software and analytics have been a major area of focus for Salesforce lately. Most of its acquisitions over the past two years have been on startups in the data analysis and prediction space, while its two major product launches last year, Salesforce IQ and IoT Cloud, are both intended to make Salesforce a smarter and more predictive software.
"This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter, everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what's the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient," Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at a recent conference.