US-based mobile marketing firm Leanplum acquires Bulgaria's Connecto

By bringing together Connecto’s AI-driven automation with Leanplum's mobile engagement platform, brands will be able to engage their customers in real time across a wide range of connected experiences, Leanplum said in a statement.

"After becoming a key player in Rakuten Viber’s bot ecosystem and partnering with brands such as Coca-Cola and Visa, we are excited to integrate our extensive IP for Natural Language Processing and sentiment analysis into Leanplum’s leading mobile engagement platform," Vassil Popovski, CEO at Connecto, said.

Emerging real-time interaction technologies like voice assistants and bots are experiencing a marketing shift from one-way broadcasts to two-way conversations, according to Momchil Kyurkchiev, Leanplum co-founder and CEO.

"Meaningful relationships between brands and their customers require real-time engagement, across multiple channels, and at different stages of the user journey — all in an automated fashion. With this acquisition, we are excited to strengthen Leanplum’s leadership as the real-time engagement platform for forward-looking brands," Kyurkchiev added.

Leanplum is building a marketing cloud, capturing more than 24 billion mobile data points daily and delivering over 50 million messages per hour. The Leanplum platform provides real-time insights and capabilities to help marketers deliver in-the-moment engagement and build customer relationships.

Founded in 2012, Leanplum has offices in San Francisco, New York, Singapore, Japan, Amsterdam and Sofia. The company said it has received more than $93 million (80.3 million euro) in funding from Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Shasta Ventures.

($= 0.8637 euro)