Aptean has announced the acquisition of TheySay. London based TheySay provides an analytics platform that delivers insights based on sentiment of text used on the web. It is Aptean’s 15th acquisition since 2015 and follows the acquisitions of Jurisdiction Online and Connect last month.
Aptean has worked with TheySay previously. The startup was established by Professor Stephen Pulman and Dr Karo Moilanen in 2011. It delivers sentiment analysis on social media and email channels for Respond, Aptean’s case management software.
The initial feedback on that integration and benefits that it delivered has had a bearing on the decision to acquire the company. Aptean CEO Kim Eaton commented: “TheySay offers some really exciting technology that help customers understand and respond faster to feedback, predict trends and monitor their reputations, which given the power of social media is more important than ever. We’re looking forward to continuing to add TheySay’s capabilities to Respond and exploring additional uses across our portfolio.”
So what has Aptean bought?
TheySay has three products: PreCeive REST API, MoodRaker and Evamind.
Preceive API enables companies to access a text analytics service to analyse raw documents. It currently supports sentiment analysis in English, German and Spanish and TheySay were looking to deliver more languages in the future.
Evamind is a data exploration platform for large scales knowledge discovery and opinion mining. It indentifies connections and opinions about topics relevant to businesses.
MoodRaker searches across social media and more than 430,000 sites to draw back sentiment information about keywords that users select. It delivers the analysis in a dashboard format that allows users to drill down from general opinions to specific comments that have influenced them
Dr. Karo Moilanen, co-founder and CTO of TheySay commented: “Our relationship with Aptean and integration of our capabilities into Respond has opened the door to an exciting new chapter for TheySay. We’re excited about joining Aptean and becoming part of such a respected company that can offer additional support and scale for our technology. We see a very bright future for TheySay’s emotion AI technology across Aptean’s extensive, multi-industry product suite.”
How much did TheySay cost?
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. However, according to Crunchbase TheySay has raised £1,500,000 in two funding rounds. The most recent in 2014 was led by Parkwalk Advisors Ltd. It invested in the company as part of its University of Oxford innovation Fund. This specifically identifies companies that spin out from the university.
There is currently no announcement on Park Advisors site to indicate the sale. The likelihood is that Aptean paid several million for the company but without further information it is speculative.
What does this mean
For Aptean this is an acquisition that could significantly enhance several other products in its portfolio. It would fit neatly into both its sales & marketing as well as service & support product lines. The latter is where Respond sits. Aptean could significantly boost the capability of several products using TheySay components and it will be interesting to see which it prioritises first.
For TheySay the acquisition could provide them with the funding and partnerships to grow quickly. More importantly it will deliver routes to market and relationships that it would not have had. While Aptean bought the company one wonders whether it was also offered to SAP as well. Co-Founder Pullman gave a keynote speech as the SAP Central Bank Summit in 2016. We found no evidence of any strengthening in that relationship though
