[#CeBIT] SugarCRM Acquires Contastic’s NLP Technology

SugarCRM Inc., the company that enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative, flexible and affordable CRM solution on the market, announced today it has acquired the intellectual property rights and other assets of Contastic, a natural language processing (NLP) platform that is designed to automatically recommend the best content for individuals to send to their contacts.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Cy Khormaee, Contastic’s CEO, has joined SugarCRM as the director of product management for predictive analytics, where he’ll help build technology into Sugar that turns customer data into actionable recommendations for Sugar users.

“SugarCRM is making strategic investments in leading technologies to make Sugar an indispensable tool that helps customer-facing individuals be more successful,” said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM. “SugarCRM will use Contastic’s NLP technology to analyze data within the Sugar platform so users can automatically send personalized content.”

In March 2015, SugarCRM acquired the assets of Stitch, a leading developer of personal assistant technologies that enhance productivity for mobile users. Incorporating Stitch Hot House Labs technology made Sugar an even smarter, better-informed CRM system, and put information at mobile users’ fingertips no matter their location. In 2014, SugarCRM acquired business process management and workflow technology from ProcessMaker. With ProcessMaker’s key assets, SugarCRM built Advanced Workflow into Sugar 7.6, which enables users to automate complex business processes like case routing and escalation, contract approval, customer and employee onboarding, and payment workflow.

Mountain View-based Contastic applies deep NLP to mine topics of interest from conversations in email and CRM. These topics are used to recommend content that is relevant to the most salient points of conversations between users and their contacts. The company’s investors include Lightspeed Ventures and IDG-Accel.

Future releases of Sugar will be enhanced with Contastic capabilities, making the Sugar platform even more intelligent in recommending the next best actions derived from customer data.

ABOUT SUGARCRM
SugarCRM enables businesses to create extraordinary customer relationships with the most innovative, flexible and affordable customer relationship management (CRM) solution on the market. Unlike traditional CRM solutions that focus primarily on management and reporting, Sugar empowers the individual, coordinating the actions of customer-facing employees and equipping them with the right information at the right time to transform the customer experience. Based in Silicon Valley, SugarCRM is backed by Goldman Sachs, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, NEA and Walden International. More than 1.5 million individuals in over 120 countries rely on SugarCRM. To learn more visit SugarCRM or follow @SugarCRM.