Two acquisitions in this new M&A roundup are said to provide industry firsts. Company executives from Airship and Gummicube say the union of the two providers will create the first comprehensive, end-to-end mobile app experience management solution. Top management at Heap and Auryc express the same enthusiasm, stating that the merging of the two companies will produce a solution integrating both quantitative and qualitative data to supply an integrated view of the customer. In other related news, Canadian CX firm Bond acquires Barcelona’s Buljan & Partners, and MoEngage and Lang.ai successfully raise additional money in new funding rounds. Details follow.

Airship Acquires App Store Optimization Provider Gummicube

Airship, the mobile app experience company headquartered in Portland, Oregon, has acquired for an undisclosed amount Gummicube, the San Jose, California-based App Store Optimization (ASO) provider of Big Data analytics for app stores. 

The acquisition combines Airship’s App Experience Platform (AXP) for accelerating onboarding and user understanding for next-level personalization and monetization, with Gummicube’s ASO technology for promoting apps or improving their visibility in app stores to boost an app’s chances of organic installs.

Executives from both companies say the union creates the industry’s first comprehensive mobile app experience management solution. For the first time, enterprises will have an end-to-end solution to optimize the mobile app experience and lifecycle, enabling brands to attract, grow, retain, and monetize app customers.

“Driving consumers to download an app is a critical first step, but keeping them engaged and maximizing value for everyone involved requires leveraging data to demonstrate customer respect and relevance with experiences that reward them for their loyalty,” says Brett Caine, CEO and president at Airship. “This industry-first combination will drive greater app success for brands, and unlock huge value for our business.”

Heap Acquires Session Replay Leader Auryc

Digital analytics firm Heap is acquiring Auryc, the provider of customer journey analytics headquartered in Los Altos, California, for an undisclosed amount. The result will be a solution combining both quantitative and qualitative data to fully illuminate the digital behavior of users and improve their digital experiences.

The acquisition will supplement the quantitative capabilities of San Francisco-based Heap in customer data collection with Auryc’s well-known strengths in session replay, heat mapping, and voice of customer (VoC), delivering a comprehensive solution aimed at eliminating broken workflows and siloed approaches.

Analysts say the combined solution is important because it resolves a long-standing conundrum. On their own, quantitative solutions cannot be reinforced with qualitative verification, while qualitative analytics cannot be viewed in the context of quantitative insight. However, a consolidated offering from the two companies, expected to be available by summer this year, will provide fast-moving teams with a complete data set, natively integrated data science, and qualitative analytics to provide rapid CX analysis.

Bond Acquires European-based Buljan & Partners Consulting

Bond, the Toronto, Canada-headquartered CX firm, is acquiring Buljan & Partners Consulting, a European consultancy based in Barcelona, Spain, dedicated exclusively to customer-centricity, and customer and employee experience.

Financial terms of the transaction were not available, but the acquisition is aimed at strengthening Bond’s global market position and expanding its expertise, allowing the organization to bring new insights, intelligence, and practices to clients in North America and Europe. The Buljan acquisition is the latest for Bond, as the company continues its ambitious growth agenda and global expansion.

An immediate benefit to Bond and Buljan clients is the added depth gained in global experience, knowledge, and insights from the merging of the two companies and supported at the outset by two proprietary research studies. The first is Bond’s Loyalty Report 2022, the first European CX study in urban mobility. The second is Buljan’s 2022 Best Xperience study, which provides insights into the experiences of 10,000 mobility users in five countries in Europe’s cutting-edge automotive sector, and how consumers are adapting to the transition to electric vehicles.

MoEngage Raises $77 Million in Latest Funding Round

MoEngage, the provider of an insights-led customer engagement platform, raised $77.0 million in Series E funding, the third round of capital infusion for the company in the last 12 months, following $32.5 million procured in July and $30.0 million in December 2021. The latest round is led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and B Capital Group, with participation from the company’s roster of existing investors, including Steadview Capital, Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Eight Roads Ventures, and Matrix Partners India.

San Francisco-based MoEngage says it will use the funds from this round to not only deepen the company’s geographic footprint in the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, but also to expand its presence to new markets like Latin America and Australia. The funds will likewise be used to explore strategic acquisitions for extending the company’s platform capabilities and provide more value to customers.

The MoEngage platform provides marketers and product owners with artificial intelligence (AI)-driven insights to create cross-channel experiences for customers. With access to real-time customer data and predictive insights, brands can offer tailored communications and recommendations that resonate on an individual basis across the customer journey.

Lang.ai Raises $10.5 Million in Series A Funding

Lang.ai, the provider from Madrid, Spain, of a language understanding platform that automates tagging and repetitive actions for support conversations, has completed a $10.5 million Series A funding round aimed at expanding Lang’s ability to help CX teams scale more efficiently in the performance of customer support tasks.

Lang automatically tags every customer conversation in real time, enabling companies through tagging to extract more granular insights on client interactions and to resolve issues more intelligently through easy-to-deploy automation rules. By understanding what customers are saying at any point in their buying journey, Lang hopes to help CX teams correlate such data to the purchase history of customers, with the system then recommending automated procedures for tedious workflows that agents must follow when dealing with specific issues.

The funding round was led by Nava Ventures, with participation from new and existing investors that included Oceans Ventures, Forum, and Flexport Fund. Also contributing to the fund were industry executives like Ada CEO Mike Murchison, Typeform CEO Joaquim Lecha, Yalo CEO Javier Mata, and senior engineering and sales leaders at AI-focused companies including Google, Weights & Biases, Looker, and Ocrolus.