SugarCRM announced this morning that it has acquired the customer intelligence startup, Node. The companies did not disclose the purchase price, but the deal ended.
Although Sugar gains a ton of AI experience, it also adds a customer forecasting element to the platform such as figuring out which customers are most likely to convert or most likely to leave.
This puts it in more direct competition with Adobe and Salesforce, which have layers of intelligence that provide that kind of predictability for some time. CEO Craig Charlton says his company's solution puts this kind of capability within the reach of more companies.
"Sugar is democratizing artificial intelligence, ushering in a new frontier in customer experience (CX) with its powerful combination of AI, time-aware and data enrichment, to drive business performance and enable predictability for companies of all. size, "Charlton said in a statement.
Node CEO and founder Falon Fatemi says the two companies had previously engaged commercially and quickly realized it would make sense to merge. "The Sugar team immediately saw the value of our forecasting platform as a service to accelerate time to market by bringing the power of forecasting into all Sugar products in specific use cases that challenged the sales, marketing and service teams. for decades, "Fatemi told ProWellTech.
Paul Greenberg, president of 56 Group and CRM author at Speed of Light, says the two companies combine well and Node is a valuable addition to Sugar. "Node fills a gap for SugarCRM by adding engagement and action analytics to both ends of the business, while providing a market differentiator for them," he said.
Node's 30 employees will join the company, but Fatemi will not be with them. Instead, he reports that he is moving on to start something new. "I'm moving on to a new adventure and will share more details when the time comes," he said.
Sugar has been around since 2004 and has raised over $ 123 million along the way. Accel-KKR bought the company in 2018 and started an evaluation and review process as private equity firms tend to do.
Last year he brought in CEO Charlton to lead things and started using acquisitions to fill holes in the platform. This represents the fourth acquisition including three last year, according to data from Crunchbase.
Node was founded in 2014 and raised over $ 43 million, according to Crunchbase.
