G2 Crowd Acquires Siftery To Add Tech Stack Data To Its Software Discovery Platform

Today, Chicago-based G2 Crowd announces that it has made its first acquisition: Siftery.1This comes just a couple of months after G2 Crowd raised $55 million in Series C funding. The round not only topped out the company’s total venture funding at over $100 million, but also made it one of the most-funded private tech companies in Chicago.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. A statement from G2 Crowd states that Siftery’s co-founding CEO Vamshi Mokshagundam, CTO Ayan Barua, and the company’s 20 employees will be joining G2 Crowd as part of the acquisition deal. G2 Crowd will be seeking new office space to accommodate its existing San Francisco team and those joining the company from Siftery. Siftery has offices in Bangalore and Kiev; international employees will get to keep their jobs.

G2 Crowd is, primarily, a business software discovery platform. Medical offices looking for new billing programs, startups looking for payroll solutions, and IT teams looking for email security tools can all search for that software on G2 Crowd. G2 Crowd also collects reviews, ratings, and pricing information about each product in its index. G2 Crowd offers paid promotion and data reporting features to software and service vendors.

Siftery, which has amassed a deep set of data about the tools and technologies companies use in their business and infrastructure stacks, brings data and technical expertise to G2 Crowd’s table.

Siftery has raised $4.1 million in known venture funding. Its most recent financing, a $4 million seed deal, was announced in February 2016. Siftery’s investors include Founders Fund, Draper Nexus Ventures, Venrock, Cherubic Ventures, and Felicis Ventures, among others.2

G2 Crowd asserts the deal was strategic. A representative from the company told us acquiring Siftery “brings a third pillar to the G2 Crowd business,” extending the company’s scope beyond helping its customers discover and purchase new software.

The merger will also help G2 Crowd’s users track and manage that software. Siftery launched its Siftery Track service in February 2018. According to a press release from the time, Siftery Track “connects to an accounting system or other financial accounts and automatically generates beautiful visualizations of historic and forecasted spend by product, category, or team.”

Through email correspondence, G2 Crowd’s CEO Godard Abel described the acquisition as “a match made in heaven,” punctuating this statement with a smiley face emoticon.

Abel said that Siftery’s co-founders have a vision “for disrupting B2B technology buying and selling” that very closely aligns with G2 Crowd’s. “We agreed that together we can realize our joint vision much more quickly,” Abel wrote. “We both share the belief that by using real-time peer advice and benchmarking technology stack and spend, we can help businesses realize their full potential by recommending the best technology stacks for all businesses and making it really easy for the buyers to connect with and purchase from the best fit vendors. Together we have far more data and AI-driven tools to help realize this vision very quickly.”

Later, he wrote that “[G2 Crowd] will be able to immediately bring the Siftery technology to the two million tech buyers visiting G2 Crowd every month, as well as add 30,000 more products to the G2 Crowd review platform and millions of data-points on best fit technology stacks.”

Abel also said that bringing in Siftery’s product team “will almost double our engineering capacity overnight.” Siftery’s tech, in turn, stands to benefit from G2 Crowd’s “much larger brand and distribution engine […] to dramatically accelerate Siftery’s growth,” Abel said.

According to Abel, “all existing Siftery users will be able to continue to use the Siftery platform as usual.” He said that, for now, G2 Crowd and Siftery’s products “will initially operate independently while we improve the integrations to the core G2 Crowd platform and unify the data structures.”

As for future deals the company might be exploring, Abel takes no options off the table.

“Any other companies that are aligned with our mission are on our radar,” he said. “If they’re helping individuals and teams maximize their potential, through better software decisions, then we’re rowing in the same direction.”

On G2 Crowd’s prospects as a startup, one early investor told Crunchbase News: “Man, I wish we had more money in G2 Crowd.” They said more news about G2 Crowd is coming in 2019.