At the beginning of this month, Visual IQ CEO Manu Mathew told BostInno that his Needham-based marketing intelligence company was mulling another funding round, but the company has ended up taking another route.
On Wednesday, New York TV ratings giant Nielsen announced that it will acquire Visual IQ. The deal is expected to close next month, and terms were not disclosed.
Visual IQ’s marketing intelligence software platform aims to provide marketers and advertisers a more granular look into the performance of their campaigns across digital, mobile and physical touchpoints. The software lets them determine things like which marketing channels are the most effective relative to the demographic they’re targeting and how to optimize marketing budgets to reach new and existing audiences.
With the acquisition, Visual IQ will allow Nielsen to capture and process larger datasets and gain access to proprietary data from advertisers, publishers and retailers.
“Visual IQ’s rich history of marketing attribution and digital intelligence combined with Nielsen’s gold-standard marketing effectiveness solutions will provide advertisers, publishers and agencies with a holistic platform that offers the transparency to optimize and improve the return on marketing investments," Matt Krepsik, Nielsen's global head of product leadership for marketing ROI, said in a statement.
Visual IQ, which has over 300 employees globally, had raised a total of $15 million in funding, with a majority of the capital coming from Boston growth equity firm Volition Capital. This marks another exit this year for Volition, which focuses on fast-growing, capital-efficient businesses that have raised no venture capital. Other exits include Chewy, which was acquired by PetSmart, and Velocify, which was acquired by Ellie Mae.
In a story near the beginning of this month, Mathew said Visual IQ was very capital efficient, which gave the company extra flexibility on when or whether it would raise another round of capital (its last round was more than five years ago). The company grew revenue more than 90 percent year-over-year for the first half of 2017.
