"It felt like fate brought us together," TrackMaven CEO Allen Gannett said about his company's first ever acquisition.
In an interview with DC Inno, Gannett revealed an announcement he would be making on Thursday morning during TrackMaven's Spark business conference.
Trackmaven, a quickly growing D.C.-based marketing analytics platform developer, has purchased another marketing analytics startup by the name of 10Stories. The move will see TrackMaven open a San Francisco office where a development team will help design a new product called TrackMaven Attribution.
Gannett, alongside 10Stories CEO T.R. Jordan, explained that the acquisition will enable TrackMaven to expand their product offerings; providing clients with detailed performance analytics for a total of 24 marketing channels, now including, among other things, in-person conferences.
TrackMaven Attribution will be sold under a SaaS model as both an add-on and separate product. The cloud-based software's pricing has yet to be decided. Attribution will become available this summer.
Gannett declined to disclose the financials behind the acquisition.
By increasing the number of marketing channels that TrackMaven's software can mine data from, the D.C. company is taking steps toward creating an all-in-one platform that can conveniently illustrate detailed ROI metrics on specific marketing campaigns regardless of whether it's a social media, digital ad or email-based strategy. The goal, Gannett described, is to give marketers the ability to make "data-driven decisions."
Funny enough, Jordan told DC Inno that he first came across TrackMaven through a conversation with his first client at 10Stories. During a Skype video call, Jordan held up his dog, a corgi named Bitters, to greet the customer.
Jordan had been contemplating how he would incorporate his dog in his company's logo. And naturally, the Skype conversation led into a comparison that included the mention of TrackMaven, who models their own logo off Gannett's corgi named Maven.
Not long after Jordan's memorable Skype call, early TrackMaven investor and Acceleprise.VC co-founder Sean Glass would make the intro between 10Stories and Gannett.
Gannett described that the fit became apparent early on from both a technical and organizational standpoint due to a similar company culture.
10Stories was looking for a sales team to scale out their operations and TrackMaven was in the midst of planning the development of a product that effectively mimicked some of the technology pioneered by 5-person 10Stories.
In the future, Gannett said TrackMaven intends to remain a D.C.-centric company. With that being said, he also looks forward to learning new things by recruiting for a San Francisco office and scaling out an operation beyond the District.
Founded in 2013, TrackMaven has raised $26 million to date from a number of private, local investors, including New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Acceleprise Ventures. In March, the company parted ways with its long time CMO, Ian Walsh. TrackMaven boasts more than 300 customers, today, and Gannett believes the addition of Attribution will help attract demand-gen marketers.
