Synthesio acquires Bunkr to build interactive business reports

Bunkr wanted to build a PowerPoint killer, making it much faster to build beautiful, interactive presentations. But the startup couldn’t attract millions and millions of users, so Synthesio is acquiring Bunkr for an undisclosed amount. The technology will live on and be integrated into Synthesio.

Synthesio is a social media monitoring and analytics platform. Big companies use Synthesio to get better at using social networks. And the company has been using Bunkr for a while for its own business reports. That’s why the startup already knew Bunkr quite well and wants to reuse the same technology for its own product.

Last year, Bunkr moved away from the all-encompassing PowerPoint-like model. Many companies create PowerPoint presentations tracking various metrics. Bunkr launched an API so that you wouldn’t have to waste too much time building these monthly reports. Bunkr would automatically get data and update the charts. And because it was a web service, you could embed YouTube videos, tweets and Facebook posts quite easily.

But it turns out that this market wasn’t big enough to turn Bunkr into a profitable company. Bunkr’s presentation tool will shut down on March 31, 2017, and you’ll be able to download your past presentations as PDFs until then.

“Our clients had some issues when it comes to handing out data to a third-party company, especially customer data,” Bunkr co-founder and CMO Edouard Petit told me. “It wasn’t a priority in their roadmaps as well. We knew it was going to be a tough sell. So we thought there would be an interesting opportunity if we could sell the company.”

Bunkr spent some time looking for an interesting acquirer. As Synthesio was already using the product and plans to work on interactive reporting tools, it made sense to sign with them.

150,000 users tried out Bunkr, which is no small feat given that PowerPoint is by far the leading product in this category. But maybe it’s too late to build a presentation tool as a standalone product. Most of the Bunkr team will join Synthesio to work on interactive reporting tools for Synthesio’s customers.