Indian startup space is slowly coming under the radar of major players in the internet industry. After Little Eye Labs acquisition by Facebook and Google buying Impermium, there is a growing trend of Japanese investors flocking in to invest in Indian startups. If rumours are to be believed, another acquisition story is slowly building up as companies like Adobe and WPP seems to be interested in acquiring another Bangalore based startup Simplify360.
Simplify360 is a social media analytics tool that sifts through social media chatter to give meaningful insights to leverage from. The tool helps companies to find trend and interests in the social media. With biggies like Wipro, Yamaha, ITC, Star Network etc as clients the company has set up a profitable business. With no significant funding, the founders have so far bootstrapped the social media tool’s growth since its start in 2009.
The social media analytics tool bears resemblance to Topsy, which was acquired last year in a surprising move by Apple. While Topsy is limited to Twitter, Simplify360 spans further into multiple social networks. The Indian startup costs $500 to start and is de facto the leader in India and APAC region and comes in 27 languages.
While social media a booming market to tap and numerous success stories is luring in big companies to dive into the opportunity. While promoting brand and increasing market outreach is the primary reason, companies now are more open to customer service / support via social channels. All of these is creating a need for social media analytics/marketing/brand/support tools for efficient channeling of the social media efforts.
Salesforce and Oracle have already acquired startups to double up their efforts to tap into the social media monitoring space. Adobe have been showing similar interests for a long time now. They seem to have finally zeroed in on the Indian startup to boost their efforts.
While Bhupendra Khanal, CEO of the Simplify360, has denied to comment on any exact deal but surely have admitted to the claim of “having some offers regarding acquisition or investment” in the company. It will be interesting to see if the deal materializes. Although it will take some time to comment on the outcome, it surely shows the potential in the Indian startup space.
