Contact: Scott Denne
salesforce.com retrenches in its latest acquisition – the $390m purchase of CRM vendor RelateIQ. Unlike past acquisitions that brought salesforce.com into new territories such as marketing (Buddy Media and ExactTarget) or mobile software development (Heroku), this deal takes out a small, fast-growing rival. Part of the reason why salesforce.com is looking closer to its core business with this transaction is likely because of the limited success it’s had in buying beyond CRM (which we covered in a recent report).
Though dwarfed in size by salesforce.com, RelateIQ was growing quickly. The 100-person company had only about 20 employees a year ago and recently scaled up its fundraising by landing a $40m series C round less than a year after the general release of its product. Though certainly generating less than $10m in revenue, we understand that RelateIQ had gained traction among SMBs, particularly in financial verticals, which played no small role in the $255m post-money valuation on its last round.
While the move is at least partially defensive, we would not be surprised to see salesforce.com play this one very aggressively, possibly even giving away a free version of RelateIQ to scoop up a bigger portion of the SMB market. Or even using RelateIQ’s interface and technology to tie together marketing and sales apps across its suite.
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