Zendesk Acquires Business Intelligence Startup BIME Analytics For $45 Million

Customer support giant Zendesk is acquiring French startup BIME Analytics for $45 million in cash. BIME Analytics is a business intelligence startup with a software-as-a-service approach. It turns data from many different sources into trends and insights. The startup raised $3.4 million from Alven Capital and business angels.

The startup provides dozens of data connectors in order to aggregate data from multiple sources — Bigquery, CSV, Excel, Intercom, Google Analytics, Salesforce and more. You can name a data point for business intelligence purposes, and chances are BIME already supports it.

Then you can create interactive dashboards, advanced visualizations or exploit the results using SQL queries. Everything is fast and distributed, you won’t have to manage servers to do these data manipulations.

This is a significant acquisition for Zendesk as the publicly traded company (NYSE:ZEN) reported $130 million in revenue last year. “The acquisition is not expected to have a material impact on Zendesk’s 2015 revenue or non-GAAP operating loss,” the company said in a press release.

BIME CEO Rachel Delacour and CTO Nicolas Raspal will keep working on BIME for Zendesk. Zendesk will use BIME’s product to promote a data-driven approach to customer support, leveraging everything about your customers to provide better support. As for existing BIME customers, Zendesk will continue to develop, sell and support its product.

This is another significant acquisition for the French tech ecosystem as Crédit Mutuel Arkéa recently acquired money pot and payment service provider Leetchi. I’m hearing that other French acquisitions are in the works.

It’s also good to see Zendesk acquiring a French startup. While BIME already has an office in the U.S., the majority of the team is in Montpellier, France. Zendesk stepped out of its comfort zone to snatch up the French startup.