SUMMARY
Acquisition To Help FullContact Build Adaptive and Powerful Platform for Managing Contacts
US-based tech firm FullContact has acquired Profoundis Labs, known for its flagship product Vibe, for an undisclosed amount. Post-acquisition, the complete team of 70 employees will be absorbed into FullContact’s global workforce.
The purchase follows $25 Mn fundraise by FullContact earlier this month to support its growth initiatives, talent hunt and further acquisitions.
Also, Arjun R Pillai, co-founder and CEO of Profoundis will take up a position as FullContact’s Head of Data Strategy.
“As a strategic partner, Profoundis has been instrumental to adding value and increasing the effectiveness of our data solutions for our clients,” said Bart Lorang, co-founder and CEO of FullContact. “Together we can further accelerate the growth of FullContact as we continue to build the most powerful fully-connected contact management platform for professionals and businesses.”
Profoundis has been associated with FullContact since last year and was in acquisition talks since February this year. It will now act as its subsidiary and is targetted to add another 1000 employees over a span of two years.
Profoundis Labs was incubated in 2012 at Kerala’s Startup Village and emerged as technology-enabled human verified data research platform. The startup is founded by Arjun R. Pillai, Jofin Joseph, Anoop Thomas Mathew and Nithin Sam, who studied together at the College of Engineering, Chengannur.
The founders earlier created three products which failed and finally got recognition with people search tool, Vibe in 2014. Vibe looks up email addresses through the APIs of most popular social networks to retrieve links to profiles, homepages, and displays short biographies of people. At this time, Vibe has reached more than 100,000 users and 200 companies across 120 countries. It earlier raised an undisclosed amount of funding in mid-2015.
It was one of the eight companies and the only Indian firm selected to take part in ‘Blackbox VC Connect’ in September 2013. Also, it was part of Microsoft Accelerator Programme and the ‘Start-Up Chile’ programme initiated by Chilean government in 2013.
Kerala’s startup community mark this acquisition as a key milestone which shows the value each company can derive over the coming years at a global scale.
“It also indicates the growing maturity of startup teams in the enterprise space and showcases the global cultural and technological synergies that are evolving,” said Keyur Patel, Chairman of Profoundis and Founder, Chairman of Fuse Global Ltd.
FullContact is a fully-connected contact management platform for professionals and enterprises. Its cross-platform suite of apps and APIs enhance contacts with 360-degree insights and spans across iOS, Mac, Android, Gmail, and Web platforms. Currently, it is used by millions of people through its free apps, enterprise customers and API platform partners.
