Botify helps the New York Times and Expedia rank more highly on Google. Check out the pitch deck it used to raise $55 million.
Partner content
Robots, in general, need vision. And all sorts of robots, from industrial equipment to advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) have relied heavily on high-resolution cameras to sense the world around them. But as we demand more and more of our inventions—industrial machines that operate without humans, cellphone apps that deliver consuming virtual reality, or fully autonomous vehicles in place of ADAS—the algorithms that control these devices need the ability to sense their surroundings in the third dimension.
Synaptics Incorporated (Nasdaq: SYNA) and DSP Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: DSPG) today announced the signing of a definitive agreement, unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, whereby Synaptics acquires DSP Group, a global provider of voice and wireless chipset solutions for converged communications, at $22.00 per share in an all-cash transaction. The combination is anticipated to generate annual run rate synergies of $30 million for the new entity to be realized within 12 months of closing and is immediately accretive to Synaptics’ non-GAAP earnings. The transaction is expected to be financed through a combination of cash on hand and a fully committed, incremental debt financing arrangement with a projected close by the end of calendar year 2021, subject to DSP Group shareholder approval and customary closing conditions.
DSP Group has leadership positions across multiple markets in the Internet of Audio Things (IoAT) with significant growth opportunities in low power SmartVoice, unified communications & collaboration, and wireless IoT devices. Most of these solutions are quite relevant to Synaptics’ existing customer base, furthering the strategy of cross-selling portfolio devices.
Synaptics recently announced its Low Power Edge AI initiative, which opens a significant long-term opportunity with ABI research predicting approximately 2.5 billion TinyML units to be sold by 2030. The addition of DSP Group’s best-in-class SmartVoice products to Synaptics’ Katana smart vision platform creates a complete portfolio that can both serve existing customer needs and address the significant future market. In addition, the combination further strengthens Synaptics’ industry-leading wireless connectivity portfolio by adding DECT Ultra Low Energy (ULE), which enables a fully-featured intelligent home security solution.
“We continue to invest in technologies that tilt our product mix toward IoT applications,” said Michael Hurlston, President and CEO of Synaptics. “DSP Group’s expertise in SmartVoice and ULE wireless solutions, coupled with Synaptics’ leadership position in far-field speech recognition and IoT directed Wi-Fi/BT combos enables us to deliver increasingly differentiated solutions to our combined customer base, while positioning us to lead the transition to AI enabled devices at the edge of the network.”
“We are excited to join forces with Synaptics, a recognized leader in products for IoT. This combination provides a great result for our shareholders who have supported us through this journey, delivering meaningful and certain value,” said Ofer Elyakim, CEO of DSP Group. “Our complementary portfolios together with the combination of our world-class engineering teams creates an exciting opportunity for DSP Group’s core technology to extend further into our existing customers’ product portfolio.”
Botify, provider of search engine optimization tools and apps, today announced that it raised $55 million, bringing its total raised to date to $82 million. CEO Adrien Menard says that the funding — a series C, led by InfraVia Growth with participation from Bpifrance, Eurazeo, and Ventech — will enable the company to grow its platform, develop its partner ecosystem, and expand its global footprint as it focuses on product R&D.
With an increasing number of businesses shifting to online as their primary channel, ensuring high placement in web searches has become a priority. There are 80,000 searches done per second, driving 53% of web traffic today. But it’s a moving target. Google alone made 4,500 algorithm updates and changes last year to Google Search.
New York-based Botify provides a platform to discover and fix problems with the aim of making sites more discoverable by search engines. Working with major search engines and internet infrastructure companies to ensure compliance with guidelines, the company develops and maintains AI-enabled analytics and automation tools that leverage more than 1,000 metrics to understand a website’s content, search engines’ behaviors, and users’ intent.
Botify was founded by Menard, Thomas Grange, and Stan Chauvin, who previously worked together at a digital marketing agency. As Menard explained, the trio came to the conclusion that companies were focusing too much time optimizing content and keywords without knowing if Google and other search engines were even crawling their webpages.
“Almost half of the pages of large, enterprise websites are not crawled by Google. When a page is not crawled or seen by Google, it will never rank in search engines, and therefore cannot drive traffic or revenue,” Menard told VentureBeat via email. “This is how Botify was born — some of [our] first customers included eBay, BlaBlaCar, and Expedia in France. [We] entered the U.S. market in 2016. Fast-forward to today, and the U.S. now accounts for more than 60% of [our] revenue.”
Welcome to this MarTech Series chat Rodolphe, tell us more about Potloc and what inspired this journey?
I created Potloc with Louis Delaoustre as a response to a much-needed revamp to the way consumer research has been conducted up until now, as consumers changed behaviors during the past 2 decades due to globalization, the rise of mobile technologies, and interconnectivity, the opportunity to make these changes happen was unique.
Potloc was born as a way to advance the methodology, using today’s technologies, and placing consumers at the heart of it all. Since we use social networks to deploy our surveys, we have access to insights of a new generation of consumers: Millennials, Gen Z, as well as other demographic and interest groups –including shoppers and non-shoppers.
In today’s highly personalized marketing and advertising environment, how do you feel marketers can improve how they grab insights from their audience to improve their targeted campaigns?
Traditionally, marketers have relied on traditional methodologies to survey their customers for more than 30 years now. Panels, phone interviews, mall intercepts all have their merits and their place in understanding consumers. However, with the advent of social media, we are now more connected and present online than ever before. There are 4.3 billion social media users worldwide. That’s a little over half the world’s population. So I would say to marketers: If you are targeting people with your products and services online through paid ads on social and other media platforms, and trusting your revenue generation with what people are doing from their phones and computers, don’t you think you should be capturing what their thoughts and experiences are in the platforms they not only love and trust but also spend a large chunk of their time at?
Getting insights from the very people you target with your campaigns, at the times when they are most open and willing to answer (usually while scrolling their social feeds), about the topics they care about, gets you fresh, honest responses that will inform not only your campaign strategy, but also your customer experience, R&D, and personalization tactics.
Smartphones are a key part of modern life but with prices routinely in excess of £1,000 for the latest high-end handsets, should you be considering cheaper secondhand or refurbished models instead?
These have the potential to be good for your wallet and the planet, as any device that is given a second life instead of being recycled reduces its lifetime environmental impact and, with it, your footprint.
Among those likely to be mulling over their mobile phone options at the moment are many parents of children going back to school after the summer break. Starting secondary school in particular is traditionally a time when many kids receive their first – or an upgraded – phone.
But when buying secondhand, there are some potential pitfalls to avoid, so here’s what you need to know to grab yourself a bargain.
...
Back Market, meanwhile, is essentially a marketplace for smaller refurbishers, and its website was this week listing more than 1,300 smartphones with an average price of £228. It offers a “12-month minimum” warranty.
When looking into retailers and websites, check out the reviews on sites such as Trustpilot. On Trustpilot this week, Envirofone, musicMagpie and Back Market all had “excellent” scores of 4.6 to 4.7, while CeX had a score of 4.3.
Which? points out that in addition to the various retailers and websites, most major UK networks will also have deals on refurbished handsets, although you will be tied into a contract with that network.
Most everyone agrees that timely and targeted consumer research is key to extracting valuable insights that can be critical across all aspects of a business, whether its product development and positioning, marketing and strategy, customer experience and satisfaction, or major company decisions about market expansion, M&A, or corporate transformation. Having a finger on the pulse of your key stakeholders is essential.
But existing market research methods have limitations, particularly in the pandemic age. Phone surveys, web portals, focus groups all have been used for decades to gauge consumer sentiment, and they still have a place in the researcher’s toolbox. But in today’s ubiquitously connected, ultra-mobile world, new ways to reach consumers need to be explored.
The rise of social media offers such an opportunity. Today, it is possible to survey a very vast population directly by recruiting respondents via channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. There are approximately 4.48 billion social media users worldwide (and the number just keeps climbing). That equates to about 57% of the current world’s population and that’s where most consumers are spending their time nowadays.
Those channels have become one of the most effective, time-efficient and inexpensive tools for recruiting target respondents and collecting data on their consumption habits. This is a natural evolution from the more passive social scraping and social listening tools that are used to gauge sentiment and drive analytics. It’s a proactive and targeted method we call social sampling and it borrows from the highly effective playbook of advertisers who have recognized the precision and effectiveness of targeting niche audiences on a global scale.
For full article
While I am not a financial analyst, as a tech analyst, I make a habit of tuning into many tech companies’ quarterly earnings reports. It really is “ground truth” for companies as they’re under the scrutiny of the SEC and investors. I make myself available for comments and questions from the media, but it’s rare that I feel moved enough to write an entire column on a company’s quarter. That said, Synaptics’ Q4-2021 earnings report was special enough to warrant a more in-depth analysis in my opinion. The company is really the bellwether high-end for IoT and I had the chance to chat with Synaptics CEO Michael Hurlston to get a deeper dive.
Background
To make sense of the company’s latest financials, it’s worth looking at Synaptics’ journey since its 1986 founding. Though the company originally distinguished itself as a manufacturer of computer trackpads, fingerprint readers and other biometric interfaces, its purview has expanded dramatically to include the likes of the IoT, mobile and automotive sectors. Amongst other things, it now builds touch controllers for car console displays, audio processors, neural network accelerators and video interfaces.
The company found itself floundering in the late 2010s, from an operational and market standpoint, trading below its value and struggling with its gross margins. I believe Synaptics has done a good job of refocusing under the recent leadership of Hurlston, developing product roadmaps and streamlining its portfolio to take full advantage of its impressive library of IP. Synaptics has even revamped its logo over the last few years, in case you hadn’t noticed.
London remains the undisputed heavyweight of the European startup ecosystem, but in 2020 Paris replaced Berlin in second place, attracting $3.4bn in investment (London accounted for $10.5bn of venture capital). Paris’s rise is rooted in government strategy – the introduction of a tech visa; the establishment of a public investment bank; changes in tax codes – as well as a series of seasoned founders reinvesting in the ecosystem; a generation of highly-educated students from the grand ecoles choosing not to go into private industry but start their own business; and grand projects such as Station F, Europe’s biggest startup incubator, which has attracted global talent.
“When I was appointed, President Macron decided that France needed 25 unicorns by 2025 – at that point we had three,” says Kat Borlongan, director of La French Tech, the government-supported agency that oversees national startup strategy. “We see it as a pipeline and the goal is to build the biggest possible talent pool by having the most open tech visa in the world and to lower the barrier to entrepreneurship.”
The government spends €1.3 billion in seed and pre-seed funding and “after that it's a velocity game,” Borlongan says. “The goal is to get from pre-seed to seed, from seed to A, to B, to C, to D all the way to the top.” There are now 120 companies that have passed through this process and each has an account manager at La French Tech who connects each business with government. “Every single ministry, government agency or administration has a touch point with startups,” Borlongan says.
Sustainability is increasingly a factor in purchasing decisions and consumer behaviour. Back Market is a marketplace for refurbished electronics offering devices at varying price points. The startup, which has five million customers, closed a series D round of $335m in May 2021 aims to expand to the US and make previously owned products the first choice for consumers. backmarket.co.uk
Copyright ©2026 | Wired Island PR. All Rights Reserved
Privacy Policy