Salesforce to Acquire Datorama, Amazon Prime Day Results, Facebook Messenger AI Payments Patent: Newsletter July 20, 2018

Salesforce this week announced an agreement to acquire Datorama Inc., a cloud-based marketing platform in an $800 million acquisition. CEO Ran Sarig indicated that the platform would be included as a part of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, chiefly providing improved data integration, intelligence and analytics enabling marketers to build custom reports of holistic marketing data captured by the platform’s native AI. To date, Datorama has only raised $50 million in funding but counts PepsiCo Inc., IBM Corp. and Unilever PLC. among its biggest clients. A closing date for the acquisition has not yet been announced.

In e-commerce news, Amazon’s 2018 Prime Day closed with the company’s highest-grossing 36-hour sales period to date, surpassing Black Friday and Cyber Monday last year. Small businesses on Amazon sold an aggregate of more than $1 billion, with 84% of brands extending promotions to more than one item (an increase of 17% from last year). While Bloomberg reported that the Amazon site’s malfunction in the first hours of the sale was estimated to cost the company c.$99 million in sales, Amazon shared in their press release that Prime Day sales grew faster in the first 10 hours of the event than the same period of last year’s Prime Day.

The machine learning world saw Facebook publish a new patent entitled “Processing Payment Transactions Using Artificial Intelligence Messaging Services”, aimed at bringing natural language processing to Messenger-enabled shopping. The bot would interpret, respond to and complete users’ purchase requests directly in the Messenger app, indicating a play by Facebook to continue a sophisticated expansion into e-commerce.

New in SaaS business listings this week we have a $257K social media marketing automation business, with years of operational history with an authoritative brand, strong year-over-year growth with MRR reaching a c.135% CAGR for the 2016 to (e)2018 period, a diversified customer base with multiple notable customers, a fully trained team in place and scalable cost structure driving strong margins. If you are interested in this business, please follow the link to request a prospectus.

In events news, the FE team had a great time at SaaStock’s summer networking event on July 12, catching up with fellow SaaS leaders and staying up to date with the latest trends in the industry. Next up, Founder Thomas Smale will be attending Affiliate Summit East in New York from July 29-31, so make sure to reply to this email to set up a meeting if you will be in the area.

Continue reading below for more on Salesforce’s acquisition of Datorama, Amazon Prime Day results, and Facebook’s new AI patent.

Listings

New

SaaS – Social Media Marketing Automation – $6.9K MRR

  • Strong year-over-year growth, with MRR reaching a c.135% CAGR for the period 2016 to (e)2018
  • Years of operational history with an authoritative brand
  • Diversified customer base with multiple notable customers
  • Well-trained team and scalable cost structure driving strong margins

Yearly net profit: $70,000
Asking price $257,000

Sold

Display Advertising – Skin Care & Treatment – $4.8K gross/mo

Affiliate – Home & Garden – $3.2K gross/mo

SaaS – B2B Amazon Analytics & Research Marketing – $1K MRR

Affiliate – Pet Accessories – $1.4K gross/mo

In The News…

Salesforce to Acquire Datorama

Salesforce has announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Datorama Inc.

To date, Datorama has only raised $50 million in funding, raising eyebrows at the $800 million pricetag on the deal. As a cloud-based analytics hub, Datorama automatically collects marketing analytics data from sources like Google Ads, Facebook and other channels companies may be utilizing in their marketing strategy. The platform’s native AI then organizes the data into a holistic picture, which marketing users can then use to create analytics dashboards. A drag-and-drop interface lets clients build reports and use features like a tool called Genius to highlight the most important data points to interpret the findings. The startup has reported that their platform can plug into more than 500 marketing tools, which helps explain the high price Salesforce paid and the value it could bring to Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, into which Datorama is expected to integrate.

Datorama is used by more than 3,000 organizations, including key customers like PepsiCo Inc. and Unilever PLC.

Amazon Reports Prime Day Results

This year’s Amazon Prime day has proven to be the biggest one yet, with more than $1 billion sold by small and medium sized businesses alone.

While Amazon does not disclose revenue statements, in a press release reporting on the event, the company stated, “On a day (and a half) with more than one million deals worldwide offered exclusively to Prime members, sales this Prime Day surpassed Cyber Monday, Black Friday and the previous Prime Day, when comparing 36-hour periods, making this once again the biggest shopping event in Amazon history. Prime members worldwide purchased more than 100 million products during this year’s Prime Day event.” New to this year’s event too was members’ ability to take advantage of deals in Whole Foods stores, which ran a week of promotions and reported what the best-selling deal was organic strawberries. Bestsellers included the Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote and Echo Dot, making it the biggest day for Amazon devices yet.

Amazon did not report how many new Prime Members they signed up during the event.

Facebook Files for AI Chat Payments Bot Patent

Facebook has filed for a new patent entitled “Processing Payment Transactions Using Artificial Intelligence Messaging Services.”

The patent outlines a messaging bot users can chat with to make payments directly through Facebook messenger. Rather than open a separate app, users would visit the company’s Facebook page and place an order for, say, a latte, directly through messenger. Previous moves to bring payments to Facebook, like person-to-person payments, and payments in messenger (still in closed developer beta) were smaller moves compared to this new patent filed. The new patent indicated Facebook’s intentions to become ubiquitous in payment processing, from ordering a drink to shopping online. This chatbot would enact Natural Language Processing (NLP) to speak with a customer and respond to requests. Chatbots are growing in popularity for customer service, with Juniper Research reporting that chatbots could bring $11 billion in cost savings for retail banking and healthcare.

While shopping and social media have more of a perceived divide in the West than in Asian countries, Facebook’s play to merge the two may represent a shift towards the two becoming indelibly tied.

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