Marketing automation platform Salesfusion has purchased LoopFuse, an analytics platform that helps clients find promising new leads, for an undisclosed price. The acquisition comes two weeks after Salesfusion closed a $8.25 million Series B round, bringing its total funding raised so far to $10.1 million.
As Ben Kepes at Forbes points out, there has been a lot of M&A activity in the CRM space recently. For example, Salesforce.com recently stretched its cash resources, taking out a $300 million loan to pay for its acquisition of ExactTarget, while Oracle’s recent purchases include Compendium and Eloqua.
Kepes notes that Microsoft doesn’t have a strong marketing automation tool of its own. By looking for acquisition targets, companies in the space may in turn make themselves attractive acquisition targets for Redmond.
Even if Salesfusion isn’t trying to position itself for an M&A, LoopFuse will help it expand its customer roster. The acquisition of LoopFuse will allow Salesfusion to double revenue and triple new customer growth in 2014, CEO Christian Nahas tells me. The company says that in 2013 it enjoyed strong growth: doubling revenue, tripling earnings before interest, tax, and amortization (EBITA); and tripling net new monthly recurring revenue and net new customers.
Nahas says that the company was attracted to LoopFuse’s talent and intellectual property, which includes “doing some exciting and powerful things with social intelligence and big data analytics to help marketers fill their funnel with quality leads.”
Both companies are focused on medium-sized companies, but they also attracted smaller businesses and enterprise customers as well, Nahas says. The acquisition of LoopFuse means that customers will now have access to a combination of Salesfusion’s marketing automation platform for the mid-market and LoopFuse’s social intelligence and predictive analytics tools. This means that Salesfusion’s customers can now go beyond their customer-relationship management (CRM) tools and find new leads similar to existing ones that have already resulted in sales.
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