What’s the first thing many businesses do with research and data gathered on SurveyMonkey, which amounts to roughly 3 million survey responses per day?
Publish it to make some sort of business case, of course, and the company just bought a 50-person marketing startup to help automate the process.
The acquisition of TechValidate is Bill Veghte’s first high-profile move since being appointed CEO early last month to replace the late Dave Goldberg, who passed away suddenly on May 1.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the eight-year-old company has more than 300 customers, many well-known tech brands: Box, EMC, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and SAP, to name just a few.
Tech Validate was co-founded by Brad O’Neill, a founding investor in StumbleUpon, and Steve Norall, whose resume includes companies like PolyServe (a storage software company eventually sold to HP), Oracle and Microsoft. It hasn’t accepted outside money, at least publicly.
TechValidate’s cloud software produces many different sorts of “credible” marketing content, such as customer testimonials, reviews, return-on-investment analysis, and case studies. “They’ve taken data analytics one step further and moved into easily and effortlessly producing verified marketing content,” Veghte said in a statement.
SurveyMonkey, based in Palo Alto, California, plans to keep the TechValidate office north of San Francisco in Emeryville. Just before the end of 2014, SurveyMonkey logged another $250 million in funding from a group that included T. Rowe Price, Morgan Stanley, and Fidelity. That brought its total to just north of $1 billion.
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