BloomReach, Inc., the leading commerce personalization platform, today announced a strategic acquisition of leading web content management company Hippo, B.V. The Hippo digital experience and performance platform is a content management system that helps businesses understand all visitors – anonymous or known – to deliver the right content at the right time on any channel or touch point.
With the integration of Hippo’s open and agile experience technology into BloomReach’s machine-learning engine, BloomReach will have the only digital experience platform that natively leverages data and algorithmic intelligence to create, build, personalize, market and measure every digital experience – across verticals and geographies.
“Hippo has engineered the world’s most sophisticated digital experience platform with a keen understanding and vision for the future of web content management. By joining its core content expertise and architectural flexibility with BloomReach’s algorithmic superiority in commerce, we can build a single experience layer that powers any brand’s digital experiences,” said Raj De Datta, CEO and cofounder of BloomReach. “Why should providing a truly personalized experience today require an enterprise to spend months or years in CMS implementation and millions of dollars integrating analytics, personalization, testing, targeting and data management solutions on top of that CMS? That’s an antiquated model.”
BloomReach envisions all businesses – both commerce and content – having three core cloud platforms powering their digital presence: a back-end or commerce platform, an experience platform powering personalization and a marketing platform handling campaign execution. The Hippo acquisition allows BloomReach to provide businesses with the experience platform layer – where data and algorithms determine each visitor’s intent and return the most relevant experience. It also will have an open architecture that easily plugs into the other platforms, including both current BloomReach and Hippo partners.
“Merging with BloomReach adds the most sophisticated intelligence available to Hippo’s content performance and delivery platform. Its engine has an unrivaled ability to analyze data both from inside and outside an enterprise,” said Jeroen Verberg, cofounder and CEO of Hippo. “Whether it’s more product purchases, deeper content engagement or finding solutions to visitors’ problems, together our platform will produce results for any business by acting autonomously, getting smarter every day, and giving users actionable insights to refine the experience.”
BloomReach has experienced significant revenue and market growth in commerce since launching in 2009, working with more than 175 of the top U.S. and U.K. commerce companies, including Neiman Marcus, Staples, Nordstrom and Homebase.
Likewise, Hippo also has experienced significant growth in recent years, currently working with more than 170 customers in 13 countries. At a time when enterprises are searching for innovative, java-based options, Hippo was recently named a Visionary in Gartner’s Web Content Management Magic Quadrant. Hippo is a proven enterprise-class CMS, working with large organizations like U.K.’s National Health Service and REI, Inc. Hippo’s strong presence in Europe and BloomReach’s strong presence in the U.S. provide complementary geographic footprints for mutual global expansion.
“The world of marketing and customer acquisition is quickly moving to machine-learning and data-driven personalized experiences. The combination of BloomReach’s world-class search and personalization technology with Hippo’s content management solution will allow companies across industries to create the most modern digital customer experiences,” said Ajay Agarwal, managing director of Bain Capital Ventures, a BloomReach investor. “We couldn’t be more excited about the acquisition and the opportunity it brings to the marketing-technology landscape.”
BloomReach and Hippo together will use data science and web-wide data to power personalization that understands content, language, context and behavior throughout the customer lifecycle, replacing strategies that market to customer segments using manually written rules.
Recent studies demonstrate that customer analytics and web content management are the top two investment priorities for digital experience technology leaders. Managing and optimizing digital experiences to date have largely required an array of software from a fragmented landscape. However, the commerce industry has been on the leading edge of adopting personalization and optimization technology, with BloomReach recognized as an award-winning leader.
Hippo will continue to operate out of Amsterdam as an independent business unit of BloomReach, supporting all customer, marketing and sales activities. The combined company will continue to support its current applications and will invest significantly in commerce and content capabilities – across all of its R&D centers in Mountain View, Dallas, Bangalore, Amsterdam and Boston.
Hippo CEO Jeroen Verberg will join the BloomReach Board of Directors and serve as general manager of the Hippo business unit. All other founders and members of the Hippo management team will remain with the company. Other terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
About BloomReach
BloomReach is a machine-learning, big-data technology company that delivers a more relevant digital experience using data from more than 75 million monthly unique consumers and the applications built on its Personalization Platform. BloomReach’s core technology – the Web Relevance Engine (WRE) – algorithmically understands content and users, matching this understanding with demand and intent data from across the Web. BloomReach’s Commerce products adapt your content to make it personal and relevant for individual users. BloomReach Compass surfaces actionable product performance and recommendations that maximize revenue.
BloomReach’s portfolio of customers include: Neiman Marcus, Sears Outlet, Staples and Williams-Sonoma. Created in 2009, BloomReach is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices in New York City, London, Dallas and Bangalore. BloomReach is backed by investment firms Bain Capital Ventures, Battery Ventures, NEA, Salesforce Ventures and Lightspeed Ventures. Visit BloomReach.com for more information.
About Hippo
Hippo is on a mission to make the digital experience more personal for every visitor. We’re redefining the CMS space by engineering the world’s most advanced content performance platform, designed to help businesses understand their visitors – whether they are known or anonymous – and deliver the content they value in any context and on any device. Together with its global network of Certified Partners, Hippo serves a rapidly growing number of enterprise clients around the world including REI, Inc., FC Bayern München, Bell Aliant, Couchbase, the Dutch Foreign Office, Randstad, Veikkaus, the University of Maryland, Edeka, 1&1 Internet, Bugaboo and Weleda.
