British social media monitoring company Brandwatch is today announcing its acquisition of London-based PeerIndex, a five-year old technology company that gives its customers analytical insights into their social media audiences and influencers.
That makes PeerIndex similar to companies like Klout and Kred; the former was also recently acquired by Lithium for $200 million.
It's unclear how much Brandwatch coughed up for PeerIndex. In a telephone conversation, Brandwatch CEO Giles Palmer said he preferred not to disclose the price he paid for 'competitive reasons', and PeerIndex CEO Azeem Azhar was also coy.
What we do know is that – according to Crunchbase – PeerIndex secured just south of $4 million in funding since it was founded in 2009, and that it recently started (but never finished) an equity crowd-funding campaign on Seedrs seeking to raise £500,000 on a pre-money valuation of £4.5 million.
Early backers include Meridian Venture Partners, Anthemis Group and a group of angel investors including as Tom Glocer (former CEO of Reuters), Marko Ahtisaari (former SVP Design at Nokia), Shery Coutu and Passion Capital's Stefan Glänzer.
The Seedrs campaign never concluded, Palmer told me, because Brandwatch was looking to bolster its social intelligence platform with more people-based analytics and PeerIndex proved a good fit.
The acquisition, a first for Brandwatch, was closed in a matter of weeks for an undisclosed mix of cash and stock - it was signed just yesterday. The deal gives Brandwatch a strategic new asset: what PeerIndex claims is the world’s largest independent Twitter author database (300 million+ profiles).
“Content without context only goes so far, and we’re telling the world just that with our acquisition of PeerIndex,” said Palmer in a canned statement. “Understanding more about the actual people behind the conversations happening online is crucial to marketers, and this is about creating technologies that will allow them to target audience segments at scale with astonishing accuracy. ”
The entire PeerIndex team of 10, primarily developers, will join Brandwatch immediately, bringing the buyer's total staff to over 300 global employees. Azhar will join the team to work on a product that combines both companies' technologies, and serve as its 'evangelist'.
Featured image credit: Twin Design / Shutterstock.com
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