Connotate Acquired by Calif.-based Import.io. Team Staying in New Jersey
Connotate, the web-content-extraction startup in New Brunswick, has been acquired by Import.io, of Los Gatos, California. The two companies had been competitors.
According to Gina Cerami, who is now Import.io’s vice president of marketing, the “acquired team will continue to have an office in New Brunswick, New Jersey, although our headquarters will now be in California.” According to the Import.io website, the New Brunswick office will become Import.io’s East Coast center of operations.
The terms of the deal were not discussed.
Connotate describes itself as the market leader in massively scalable web content extraction. “Our combination of proven technology and real-world experience turns the web’s big data into a worldwide database for our customers,” the company says on its website.
“With Connotate, information service providers and other data-centric companies dramatically increase their content harvesting capacity, drive down their ongoing cost of content extraction, and radically reduce the complexity of their downstream data operations,” it continues.
Inport.io, a growth-stage startup, recently concluded a Series B funding round led by Talis Capital, a London-based venture capital firm. Connotate’s last round, in 2016, raised $11 million in follow-on funding led by Long River Ventures (Boston), with participation from existing shareholders .406 Ventures (Boston), Castile Ventures (Wellesley, Mass.), Fernwood Funding (Wilmington, Del.), Prism Venture Management (Westwood, Mass.) and other angels.
Almost all of Connotate’s team of 30 people are staying on with the new company. Kelley Scott, former director of software engineering at Connotate, will have the same position at Import.io, where she will be responsible for a significant portion of the expanded engineering team. Vincent Sgro, founder and CTO of Connotate, will join as chief scientist.
In a release, Import.io noted that Connotate would be contributing new technology, including eight patents. Import.io will consolidate this technology into a superset solution that will be available to all customers.
With the addition of more than 70 enterprise-class customers, including Dow Jones, Cox Automotive, Capital One Services and Moody’s Analytics Knowledge Services, Import.io’s customer base now exceeds 850 customers, including many of the largest companies in the world.
Gary Read, CEO of Import.io, stated that “external spend on web data extraction is growing 70 percent annually as organizations shift from internal engineering led projects to enterprise-class SaaS.
“This acquisition will help us to continue to rapidly scale to meet the exploding demand for our solution and, most importantly, will further enable us to help our customers achieve success and competitive advantage,” he added. “All customers, whether currently with Connotate or Import.io, will benefit.”
According to an Import.io FAQ page, Connotate customers will continue to use their Connotate solutions. Customer support will be provided by the combined Import.io team, but customers from Connotate will likely be dealing with the same individuals as before. In the longer term, Import.io will be developing a superset product so that all customers can take full advantage of the complete Import.io offering.
