Part of the ebb and flow of the Portland startup community — or any startup community for that matter — is a regular cadence of companies being founded, funded, and acquired. We’ve seen a great deal of the founding and funding over the past few years. And now, there’s another acquisition in our midst. PIE and Techstars Seattle alum Caravel has been acquired by Commsor.
What makes an AI that helps analyze conversational customer data attractive to a community management platform like Commsor? The fact that the combination of the two solutions has the potential to “deliver a complete understanding of communities by combining quantitative and qualitative insight.”
Plus, the combination holds the potential to expand Commsor offering beyond the realm of community management to make it more broadly applicable to the companies that adopt it:
With this acquisition, we’re thrilled to support not only your Community teams but also Support, Success, and Product. The qualitative insight from Caravel combined with the community touchpoints from Commsor will provide a holistic picture to understand what people are doing, what’s important to them, and how you can better build your company around their needs.
“The Commsor acquisition presents an opportunity to make a significant impact on the future of community by bringing our suite of state-of-the-art NLP solutions to a company that is leading the way for community-led growth,” Maxwell Folley, CEO and founder of Caravel, said in a statement to GeekWire.
Personally, I’ve had the pleasure of watching this startup form, grow, pivot, and now exit. The founding team was part of Wieden+Kennedy while PIE, the startup accelerator I manage, was housed in the W+K building. And then as the company began to become a reality, the team agreed to participate in PIE a few years later. It’s been an honor to closely observe their journey and I’m excited to see what they do with the resources that Commsor — another startup of which I’m a huge fan — avails.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Commsor was valued at $450 million at its $50 million Series B.
For more information on the acquisition, see posts from Carvavel and Commsor. Or read the GeekWire coverage.
[Full disclosure: Caravel is a PIE alum. I am the cofounder and general manager of PIE.]
