M&A season has arrived in the tough tech job market.
This morning, Beamer, a Boulder, Colorado-based company that develops tools for businesses to reach users through their apps (like push notifications), announced that it is a user onboarding software startup. announced that it would acquire Userflow for $60 million.
Satya Ganni, CEO of Beamer, said the acquisition is financially supported by Arsenal Growth Equity and Camber Partners, Beamer's lead investor, and will provide an integrated toolkit for product teams. This will expand Beamer's capabilities.
“First and foremost, Beamer and Userflow's current customers should know first and foremost that this partnership will allow both companies to better serve the needs of their existing customer bases,” he said in an e-mail. he told TechCrunch via email. “As we see market demand for a suite of connected tools that includes Beamer’s capabilities, a shared vision and demand from both customer bases will ensure that both products continue to evolve and serve both existing and future customers. Among other things, we leverage Userflow to better serve the needs of product organizations around the world. ”
Headquartered in San Francisco, Userflow was founded in 2019 by Sebastian Seilund and Esben Friis-Jensen. Before joining Userflow, Seilund helped start his accounting software vendor, Billy, and spent about a year as a software engineer at Google. Friis-Jensen previously co-founded Cobalt, an app security platform, and before that he was a consultant in Accenture's SAP division.
Userflow provides a suite of modules for creating product onboarding experiences (experiences that incorporate checklists, polls, product tours, and more). The platform allows developers and non-developers to create new and existing in-app help guides and feature announcements using a content editor that supports multimedia such as links, live customer support chat, images, and videos. can be added to any app.
One of the more unique features of Userflow is automatic triggers. Developers can set up triggers that perform actions, such as proceeding to the next step in an onboarding flow, when a user clicks an element or types in a text field. Userflow can also facilitate investigations and collect metrics that can be collected into analysis tools such as Amplitude and Mixpanel.
Seiland pointed out that user flows were completely bootstrapped before today.
“This is a proud moment for Userflow, which started this initiative in 2019,” he said, adding that there are no plans to reduce staff. “Joining forces with Beamer and aligning with Camber’s vision opens up entirely new and exciting opportunities for our customers. We are excited about the potential of the combination to better serve our customer base.”
Either way, Userflow seems like a good fit for Beamer's product vision. Founded in 2017 by Mariano Rodriguez and Spencer Kuhn and backed by $20 million in venture capital, Beamer is a team that builds apps, services, and software that highlights new features and prioritizes what they build next. It is intended to help you rank and collect user feedback.
Beamer's business has benefited from an industry-wide shift in focus to customer retention. A recent study by OneSignal, a customer engagement platform, found that 95% of product and marketing professionals believe retention is “very important” or “somewhat important” to their business . reason? This is an almost surefire way to increase your revenue. According to research conducted by Bain & Company's Frederick Reichheld, increasing retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%.
Beamer competes with many product engagement platforms on the market, including Batch, which raised $23 million in 2021. However, one could argue that the Userflow acquisition puts Beamer in a better position to pursue more differentiated and possible areas. Its value will increase from $19.73 billion in 2023 to $33.11 billion in 2028, according to Mordor Intelligence.