Fresh Off New Funding, Alexa Competitor SimilarWeb Acquires Competitive Intelligence Engine Tapdog

SimilarWeb, the Tel Aviv-based web rankings provider and competitor to services like comScore and Alexa, is announcing today that it has acquired fellow Israeli startup, Tapdog, makers of a competitive intelligence engine that aims to simulate how an analyst thinks, using data science and machine learning technology.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but we understand that deal is the “range of millions.”

The five-person Tapdog team included developers, designers and product managers, and all have already moved into SimilarWeb’s offices. The company had raised $500,000 in outside funding to date.

tapdog-team-small

The startup, a graduate of Silicon Valley’s UpWest Labs accelerator program, was founded by a team of ex-military intelligence officers. To make its engine work, the company focused on developing a deep understanding of an information source’s behavior, its characteristics, and how it relates to other sources. Then, Tapdog would use machine learning technology to classify predictors, cluster the more important business developments, and finally derive actionable insights into those findings.

Tapdog looks like something of a competitor to SimilarWeb, as it also offered data regarding a company’s traffic and SEO ranking and social presence, for example. However, it actually used to be a SimilarWeb client – pulling in SimilarWeb’s data into its platform. Tapdog also went deeper into companies, tracking things like press mentions, the business’s team structure (and if that changed), and it was working to track business’ ad campaigns, too. Its customers, who remain anonymous, could access this competitive intelligence online, or be notified when there were changes through email alerts.

SimilarWeb has the money to spare for the acquisition, as it recently raised a Series C round in the tens of millions itself, entirely fromĀ Naspers, the South African multinational that owns minority stakes in major internet companies, like Tencent and Mail.ru. The acquisition makes sense for the company, too, as it also has a strong data science team in-house to help make its web and mobile analytics estimates more accurate.

tapdog2