Brandwatch acquires SaaS market research platform Qriously

Brandwatch, the world-leading social intelligence company, has acquired London-based SaaS research platform Qriously to fuse the best of modern market research with its heritage in social intelligence.

While legacy social listening players are competing with similar features from the same social media data sources, Brandwatch is differentiating itself by adding Qriously’s real-time survey functionality, enabling its customers to bring in targeted insights directly from participating consumers, all within an integrated intelligence suite.

This acquisition was driven by Brandwatch’s strategy to create ‘a new kind of intelligence’ for consumer insights, brand and marketing professionals that blends the strengths of traditional research – with its trusted focus groups and surveys – with the speed, scale and flexibility of social media research.

The October 2018 merger between Brandwatch and Crimson Hexagon created the industry’s most intuitive, AI-powered social listening platform that indexes a massive archive of public consumer conversations to deliver brand insights. This Qriously acquisition now adds first-party quantitative research to the company’s total pool of brand and consumer insight and enables its customers to proactively dig deeper into their online research by launching targeted surveys, with global reach and near-immediate results.

The market research industry is worth over $40 billion and is dominated by firms using outdated online panels which, while heavily relied upon, are slow, expensive and geographically limited. Qriously has developed a next-generation technology to disrupt this by enabling access to over 2 billion devices all over the world in real-time. Clients include Spotify, Coinbase and P&G.

“It’s not often you meet a group of people as fresh and innovative as the Qriously team who have built a deep, technically strong solution to a problem that is on your own roadmap,” said Giles Palmer, co-founder and CEO of Brandwatch. “We’ve never met such a team who saw the world the way we do and want to join up to create something really new, but that’s what happened with Qriously. I’m delighted that Chris and his colleagues have decided to join us. We’re going to do great things together.”

“The future of market research is 100 percent combining different data types,” said Christopher Kahler, co-founder and CEO of Qriously. “Prompted survey and unprompted social data surface different types of insights, and looking at them together gives you a 360-degree picture. The chance to develop this approach with Giles and his team is an opportunity we’d be nuts not to seize.”

Brandwatch is assembling the technologies to bring business intelligence into the era of AI – a plan that was kicked into overdrive with the merger of the two most respected, insight-driven social listening companies, and brought closer to reality with this Qriously announcement.

Source: Brandwatch

  Brandwatch, Business, Digital, Market Research, Marketing, Mergers & Acquisitions, Qriously, SAAS, Technology