SimilarWeb, a service that offers tools to measure website traffic and related mobile app data, has now made its second acquisition with the purchase of Tel Aviv-based content discovery platform Swayy. The deal, which was for less than $5 million, was largely aimed at acquiring the team’s talent and expertise to aid with the development of SimilarWeb’s own content recognition algorithms.
Swayy had previously raised $550,000 from investors, including Elevator Fund, Star Farm Ventures and RSL.
The startup, founded by Ohad Frankfurt, Oz Katz, Shlomi Babluki, and Lior Degani, competed in the broader social media management space alongside similar tools like HootSuite or Bottlenose. But instead of focusing on social media management directly, Swayy was more about serving as a content curation tool for businesses lacking a social media or branding team. The service would analyze a business’s online community, then suggest content to post to networks like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
The service launched in late 2013, and grew to 50,000 active users, around 2 percent of which were paying customers. Following the acquisition, however, Swayy’s platform will be shut down over the next few weeks and those customers will no longer be supported.
Explains SimilarWeb, its interest in the deal was in Swayy’s founders expertise in understanding content and making recommendations, which will help SimilarWeb’s recognition technology become more accurate. The Swayy team had built its own proprietary Natural Language Processing and Personalization Engines, and now they’ll apply those same skills to help SimilarWeb improve its data regarding the usage patterns of millions of websites and apps.
SimilarWeb, which began as something as an Alexa or comScore competitor, has invested heavily in its R&D, in order to not only measure websites’ traffic patterns and data, but also to understand how web data and mobile data can overlap. It wants to understand the influence web traffic has on mobile and vice versa. For example, now that Google is indexing apps in its search results, SimilarWeb is able to see how much traffic those apps get, and what keywords work to send traffic to those apps.
This is the company’s second acquisition aimed at beefing up its intelligence capabilities – SimilarWeb bought a competitive intelligence engine Tapdog last year for its data science and machine learning tech.
SimilarWeb says the four founders are now joining as a part of the acquisition and will work out of its R&D headquarters in Tel Aviv.
“The Swayy team are super talented and we have been tracking their progress for a while. When the opportunity came to bring them into the SimilarWeb fold we didn’t hesitate for a second,” said Or Offer, CEO and founder of SimilarWeb in statement. “We have great ambitions at SimilarWeb, having grown from 70 to close to 200 employees over the last 12 months. The Swayy team will help us improve the quality and depth of our products right from the start.”
SimilarWeb doesn’t disclose its own customer figures or revenue metrics, but the company today reports “thousands” of paying customers.