Synthesio is announcing its second acquisition of the year — it’s buying Social Karma, a company that uses social data to help marketers understand consumers.
Back in January, Synthesio announced that it had acquired presentation software-maker Bunkr. Co-founder and CEO Loic Moisand told me that this is all part of a two-year strategy to buy up companies and technologies that can help turn Synthesio into a comprehensive social listening and analytics suite.
In this case, Moisand said he was particularly impressed by Social Karma’s ability to help marketers research the interests and preferences of different consumer “personas” — rather than relying on old-fashioned surveys, they can use Social Karma to automatically collect consumer data from Facebook Network Security.
Social Karma could also help Synthesio customers formulate their content strategies and track the results of their efforts on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The plan is to continue selling Social Karma as a standalone module, with further integration into the Synthesio platform down the road.
The Social Karma team will continue to work out of Brussels, adding to a list of Synthesio offices that already includes New York, Paris, London and Singapore.
“Social Karma was founded to help marketers and advertisers measure, compare and optimise their advertising and campaign performances on social networks,” said Social Karma founder and CEO Thierry Soubestre in the acquisition announcement. “This is why becoming a part of Synthesio will help us reach this ultimate goal, as Synthesio’s industry leading and incredibly rich global social data will allow our platform to provide insights that we have never before been able to access.”
As for where Synthesio fits into the broader landscape, Moisand acknowledged that it can look like there are hundreds of competitors. (“It’s crazy,” he said.) On the other hand, he argued that “if you look at companies that have reached a certain size, have raised a significant amount of money … when you look at who’s working with global brands, you’re down to a few players.”
Naturally, he sees Synthesio as one of those players. The company has raised more than $30 million in total funding, according to CrunchBase, and it says its customers include L’Oreal, WPP, Conde Nast and many others  freemax starre v3.
The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
The first step of any salesperson is to figure out who to pitch, but some of them are wasting time targeting the wrong prospective clients.
That’s the premise behind Node, a startup that says its platform uses artificial intelligence to find sales leads. In “stealth mode” for the past 2.5 years, the company is now announcing a $10.8 million venture financing round led by Avalon Ventures, with participation from Mark Cuban, NEA and Canaan Partners.
Cuban told TechCrunch that he invested because “it is an incredible company that is changing the game for sales intelligence.” He says that with Node, “selling is no longer hunting and gathering. They make it a knowledge approach.”
Falon Fatemi, founder and CEO at San Francisco-based Node, says that her work experience at Google helped her understand how to build search algorithms that help businesses. She says that Node’s platform is a “search engine without a search box.” It’s “people-based intelligence.”
She summed up her business by saying that “the main problem that we’re solving is that we’re essentially facilitating the discovery of the right person at the right company at the right time and even suggesting the right message to reach out.”
While Node is targeting salespeople right now, she hopes to eventually build platforms for other categories. In the future, Node will be “recommending the next hire, next job opportunity or even dating tourism publication.”
There have been a flurry of investments in sales startups, as investors believe there’s a large market opportunity in sales efficiency. Salesforce Venture, Box Group and 500 Startups have been the most active in the category.