Social Influence Startup PeerIndex Acquired By Brandwatch in Cash/Shares Deal

After raising $22 million in May this year social media monitoring startup Brandwatch has clearly been hunting around for arrows to add to its quiver. It’s gaze has now alighted on ‘social influencer mapping’ startup PeerIndex. Terms of the deal were undisclosed but TechCrunch understands the majority of the deal composed of shares in BrandWatch combined with cash. Peer Index had raised a total of £5 million to date.

Peer Index had originally started out looking like a competitor to Klout, but pivoted into a B2B product aimed at marketers.

Brandwatch said Azhar would now be building a “stealth product” combining the two technologies.

PeerIndex had, in the last month or so, been in the midst of raising money on the Seedrs crowd equity platform, but pulled out of the process when the offer came in from Brandwatch.

Founder Azeem Azhar and his 10-strong team will now join Brandwatch. He will head up the PeerIndex product group while also joining senior management.

The two companies now plan to combine their respective strengths in content and audience mapping and analysis.

PeerIndex had previously built one of the world’s largest independent Twitter author databases and released much-published listed around the most influential Twitter users.

This is Brandwatch’s first acquisition.

Giles Palmer, Brandwatch CEO says the move was made because Peer Index “adds the best audience analysis and with our best content analysis. That helps marketers know where to position their messages. For example, we’ll now be able to say why things have spread socially by looking at the content, the message and who shares it – and understand the virality. Because of Peer Index we’ll know who are most likely sharers of a message and how they are networked.”

He said Brandwatch now has 50% of it’s revenues outside of the UK, largely in the US, 300 staff and 1200 customers.

Azhar told me: “The market is changing, its all about whole product companies, and customers buying from big enterprises. We have found every one of our customers was either using Brandwatch or using a competitor of them.”

from TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/GbI__NfqoA0/

via IFTTT