As Cisco Snaps Up CloudCherry, A Look At Its Recent Acquisitions

Moring Markets: Cisco bought another startup this week. Let’s examine its recent acquisition pace.

Cisco, best known for its networking hardware business, bought another company this week. Its purchase of CloudCherry was its fifth known acquisition of 2019.

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Notably, Cisco’s appetite for smaller companies appears to be accelerating. The firm, however, buys companies large and small, so when we examine the company’s known acquisitions over time, recall that some of these deals are far larger than others, making the question of pace a bit more complicated than our chart will indicate.

Here’s a look at Cisco’s known acquisitions since the start of 2018, via Crunchbase data:

The third quarter of 2019 is just over half complete, meaning that Cisco could set an even higher record in the period for deal volume. And, as the Acacia deal itself was worth a huge $2.6 billion, Cisco could set a local maximum in terms of dollars spent on acquisitions in a single quarter to go along with a numerical deal volume record.

CloudCherry

Dialing into the most recent deal, Cisco announced its CloudCherry buy on Monday. The smaller firm, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, raised $16 million while private.

CloudCherry’s venture history included a $1 million Seed round back in 2015, and a two-part Series A worth an aggregate $15 million across its $6 million 2016 infusion, and a later $9 million 2018 add-on. Pelion Venture Partners led part of the Series A, while CloudCherry itself has taken on capital from Vertex Ventures, IDG Ventures, a Microsoft accelerator, and, notably Cisco Investments.

We’ve covered the world of corporate venture capital a few times over the last year, but it still feels slightly uncommon to see large tech companies swallow their investments whole. Perhaps that will change when the economy turns.

Regardless, according to Cisco, CloudCherry’s “predictive analytics, rich customer journey mapping and sophisticated survey capabilities for customers operating contact centers in the cloud or on-premises” will wind up as part of its Contact Center product line. And as ZDNet notes, it seems that Cisco is taking on the CloudCherry team en masse.

Looking into the future, Cisco Investment dramatically picked up its investing pace at the start of 2014. Since then it has cut dozens of checks. If the company decides to do more shopping, it should have a ready-list of startups to look at if CloudCherry is any hint.

Illustration: Dom Guzman