Netvibes acquired by Dassault Systèmes for $26M. Update from Om Malik at 6:39 a.m.
PST, Feb. 9. Netvibes has been sold for about 20 million euros, or roughly $26 million, according to folks familiar with the transaction. While it is not a blockbuster outcome, it is the best possible outcome for the company, which has had a tumultuous history. The company, which was founded by Tariq Krim, a French entrepreneur, was once the shining star of the Web 2.0 movement, but it fell on hard times, only to be rescued by focusing on an entirely different set of customers.
Netvibes should also be a cautionary tale for all of today’s shooting stars who get caught up in the hyperbole. Netvibes Acquired by Dassault Systèmes. Dassault Systèmes has acquired Netvibes, the online dashboard services company that began as a personalized news service before transitioning to becoming a tool for companies to view and manage its brand presence.
Details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Netvivbes builds dashboard intelligence platform for Fortune 500 brands, enterprises and agencies. Customers include Coca Cola, HP and a number of high profile brands. It’s in many ways a widget maker. Thy say they serve a billion Web apps per month and have 250,000 apps in its network. Dassault Systèmes is a French technology giant that develops 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions that support industrial processes and provide a 3D vision of the entire lifecycle of products from conception to maintenance to recycling.
From the press release: The news is noteworthy. Analytics Dashboard Netvibes Sold To Dassault Systèmes. Netvibes has just been acquired by European product design company Dassault Systèmes (sure this isn’t the type of thing I usually write, but I like the founder Tariq Krim so bear with me here … ).
French startup Netvibes is a sentiment analytics dashboard that allows Fortune 500 companies to track their social media presence throughout the realtime web. Dassault is a “3D experience” design company — which lets designers virtualize how products will work in the real world — so the acquisition actually seems jarring at first, but Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini tells me that the buy actually makes sense in terms of connecting what people say about a product to its design process through the Netvibes dashboard. “With the birth of the real-time Web, companies need to adapt to everything and everyone inside and outside their borders. “It is the synchronization of the outside world and the inside world into one world,” Mini said over the phone. [Exclu] Freddy Mini décode Netvibes : de 2005 au rachat par Dassault Systèmes.
Netvibes: naissance, vie et réussite d'une startup. Netvibes a été l'une des coqueluches du Web2.0.
Son interface révolutionnaire pour l'époque (voir ici en 2006) ringardisait les lecteurs de Rss. Quand j'ai découvert cette interface (développée par Florent Frémont) lors d'une rencontre avec Tariq Krim, en Septembre 2005, j'ai immédiatement eu envie d'aider au décollage du projet, en tant qu'investisseur puis très rapidement en tant que co-CEO. La période était exaltante, Tariq faisait rêver tout le monde lors de ses prêches enflammés. Nous avons levé beaucoup d'argent (12 millions) auprès d'Index et Accel. Un temps, nous avons imaginé que Netvibes allait devenir un produit grand public, un portail personnalisable pour l'accès à Internet, pratiquement une sorte de nouveau Yahoo! Las, très vite il est apparu que les chiffres d'audience astronomiques annoncés par Tariq étaient quelque peu exagérés.
Les investisseurs de Netvibes, Index et Accel, ont eu la bonne idée de nommer Freddy CEO après mon départ. Netvibes Makes It To Profitability By Appealing To Businesses. Netvibes CEO Freddy Mini announced today that the startup founded five years ago has finally made it to profitability.
The site has seen a lot of changes since then. It began as one of the original Web 2.0 personalized homepages, became a distributed widget platform, changed CEOs (when founder Tariq Krim stepped down in 2008 to start Jolicloud), then started appealing to enterprises, brands, and advertisers with intranet offerings and social media dashboards. I chatted with Mini today, who says that the company is profitable on a net income basis. He won’t go into details on revenues, but the company has 40 employees and two offices. Just to cover salaries, it’s got to be pulling in a few million dollars a year. Netvibes for Enterprise: 50% Netvibes Premium Dashboards: 40% Widget Distribution: 10% The enterprise version, which accounts for half of the company’s revenues, lets employees customize their intranet homepage with a mixture of company and personal widgets.
High Five, Netvibes! Today, I’m proud to announce that Netvibes is turning five–and even prouder to share that we’re growing faster than ever.
Not only are we profitable, we’re on track to grow 80% in revenue this year. As you know, five years are five lifetimes in startup years. Out of all of the industries on this planet, the Web is the most ferocious and fastest changing environment in the history of business. But what’s important is not which species go extinct along the way, but rather what new forms they have evolved into and where they are evolving tomorrow.