Text Analytics 2015 – Technology and Market Overview

Follow the Money: Investments

Investment activity is a forward-looking indicator, suggesting optimism about a company’s growth potential and likely profitability and more particularly, the viability of the company’s technology and business model and the talent of its staff.

I’ll run through 2014 funding news and mergers & acquisitions activity, although first I’ll again note one 2015 acquisition in the space, IBM’s purchase of AlchemyAPI, and NetBase’s $24 million Series E round.

In 2014, chronologically:

1. “Verint‘s $514m purchase of KANA opens lines beyond the call center.” I’ve linked to a 451 story; here’s Verint’s press release. Verint is a global playing in customer interaction analytics and other fields; target KANA had itself bought voice of the customer (VOC)/text analytics provider Overtone back in 2011. Big question: Has Verint (by now) replaced its OEM-licensed Clarabridge text analytics engine with the Overtone tech? (January 6, 2014)
2. “HootSuite Acquires uberVU To Bolster Analytics Offering,” acquiring a social intelligence company whose tech stack includes text analytics. (January 22, 2014)
3. “Confirmit Acquires Social Intelligence and Text Analytics Innovator Integrasco.” A couple of Norwegian firms get hitched: A voice of the customer (VOC)/enterprise feedback vendor and text analytics/social intelligence vendor. (January 22, 2014)
4. Sentisis, which focuses on Spanish-language analysis, collected €200 in seed funding, per Crunchbase. Now, a year later, Sentisis has done a $1.3 million Series A round. (February 14, 2014 and March 18, 2015)
5. A French social listening company: Synthesio Secures $20 Million Investment from Idinvest Partners. Here’s an interview I did with Synthesio’s text analytics lead, Pedro Cardoso, last November: “From Social Sources to Customer Value: Synthesio’s Approach.” (March 14, 2014)
6. Gavagai, a Swedish start-up, pulled in 21 million knonor, which translates to about US$3.2 million. (The name “gavagai” is a sort-of inside joke and was used once before by an NLP company!) (March 24, 2014)
7. Text analytics via Hadoop played a part in FICO‘s April acquisition of Karmasphere. (April 16, 2014)
8. “Pegasystems buys Bangalore analytics startup MeshLabs,” reported the Times of India. (May 7, 2014)
9. “Attensity Closes $90 Million in Financing.” Attensity was one of the first commercial text-analytics providers, going beyond entities to “exhaustive extraction” of relations and other information. I put out a two-part appraisal last summer, “Attensity Doubles Down: Finances and Management” and “Attensity, NLP, and ‘Data Contextualization’.” (May 14, 2014)
10. “Inbenta, company from Barcelona specialized in Intelligent Customer Support software with Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing, raises $2 million from Telefónica.” (May 14, 2014)
11. Brandwatch pulled in $22 million in new funding. There’s a press release from the social analytics vendor, which has basic text analytics capabilities — former CTO Taras Zagibalov presented at my 2011 sentiment symposium (slides, video) — although it appears they’re a bit stale. (May 22, 2014)
12. “NetBase Completes $15.2 Million Round of Expansion Funding.” NetBase has strong multi-lingual text analytics and appears to be on a not-as-fast-as-they-would-hope path to an IPO: The company just took in another $24 million, in Series E funding, on March 13, 2015. Taking on more fuel before IPO take-off, I assume. (July 15, 2014)
13. “Synapsify bags $850K.” Congratulations (again) to Stephen Candelmo! (July 24, 2014)
14. “Innodata Announces Acquisition of MediaMiser Ltd.“, which you can learn about from the target’s perspective as well,
    “Well, this happened: We’ve been acquired by Innodata!.” (July 28, 2014)
15. “Digital Reasoning Raises $24 Million in Series C Round Led by Goldman Sachs & Credit Suisse Next Investors.” Cognitive computing! (October 9, 2014)
16. “Maritz Research buys Allegiance, forms MaritzCX” This is an interesting take-over, by a research firm — Maritz is/was a customer of Clarabridge’s, and maybe of other text-analytics providers — of a customer-experience firm that in turn licensed Attensity’s and Clarabridge’s technology, although Clarabridge’s seemingly on a capability-limited basis. (November 5, 2014)
17. “Brand a Trend, a Cloud – based Text Analytics Company based out of Heidelberg, Germany, announced a $4.5 million round of funding that it will use to push into the U.S. and the booming digital market” — that’s the SUMMICS product — following on a $600 thousand 2013 founding investment and a February 2014 $euro;800 thousand seed investment. (November 11th 2014)
18. Natural language generation: “Narrative Science pulls in $10M to analyze corporate data and turn it into text-based reports.” Rival Arria did an IPO, as NLG.L, in December 2013. (November 28, 2014)