Explore, a specialist in the development of B2B business solutions, has taken a minority stake in Sociétéinfo (SmartData) with the support of Activa Capital.
This acquisition will enable Explore to deploy innovative solutions on the B2B data market and thus strengthen its position on its market in France.
Based in Neuilly-sur-Seine (Western Paris) and created in 2017 by Alexandre Conraud and Antoine Onnen, SmartData, through its brand Sociétéinfo, offers its clients B2B sales and marketing solutions. The result of open data and more than three years of R&D, Sociétéinfo offers a 360-degree vision of companies through its legal and financial data, descriptions of organisation’s activities and personal contacts. Its algorithms trawl, aggregate and index millions of data items from legal databases and the web (sites, social networks) every day. The solution can be used to automatically identify key employees and managers of any company or to enrich databases with precision.
This new partnership between two B2B data expert companies creates technical as well as commercial synergies and will enable the two companies to collaborate on new innovative services. As a tangible sign of this partnership, Sociétéinfo’s teams are moving to Explore’s offices in the 15th district of Paris.
With this transaction, Explore has completed its second external growth operation. The transaction was financed by a line of financing set up at the closing of the January 2019 LBO by Activa Capital alongside Explore’s management team.
This transaction demonstrates the ability of Activa Capital, Explore’s majority shareholder, to support entrepreneurial managers in the transformation of growing SMEs and the structuring of external growth operations.
Laurent Nicouleau, Co-founder of Explore, says: “We were quickly won over by Sociétéinfo’s approach, its capacity for innovation, the soundness of its technical approach and the originality of its economic and commercial model. The complementary nature of our offers quickly became apparent, enabling us to offer the best service to our clients. Sales and marketing organisations are always looking for more contextual information, but also hyper-targeted contact data to feed their daily operations. With Sociétéinfo we can offer a wide range of data enrichment scenarios, contextualised email generation and semantic targeting that are unrivalled on the market. This data can of course be integrated into our clients’ information systems, including those deployed by Gestinnov, our subsidiary dedicated to CRM & ERP integration.”
Antoine Onnen, CTO and Founding Partner of Sociétéinfo, adds: “For Sociétéinfo, joining forces with Explore’s teams is an opportunity to combine our technical know-how while retaining our DNA. We share the same vision of the market and we are delighted to be able to benefit from the long experience of Explore Group’s management in this strong growth phase we are experiencing.”
Alexandre Masson and Christophe Parier, Managing Partners of Activa Capital, says: “This second build-up for Explore is in line with our desire to support ambitious founders to help them accelerate their development. The partnership of Explore and Sociétéinfo offers very promising growth prospects.”
