Mobile marketer Leanplum buys Connecto’s conversational marketing

Mobile marketing firm Leanplum is all about creating relationships between brands and their customers, using in-app messaging, push notifications, email marketing and web push notifications.

This week, the San Francisco-based firm added another capability for improving those relationships, announcing that it has acquired AI-powered conversational marketing firm Connecto.

Based in Bulgaria, Connecto has developed a chatbot builder for such platforms as Facebook Messenger and Viber. Its intention, the company says on its website, is to support 24/7, cost-efficient customer service for frequently asked questions, marketing and re-engagement, with more complicated queries bounced to humans.

This isn’t a unique goal, given the many other chatbot platforms out there for handling routine queries. But the acquisition — propelled by $47 million in Series D funding raised by Leanplum last November — is another capability in the mobile marketing platform’s quest for a “next generation marketing cloud,” where mobile is employed to build “personalization at scale.”

Leanplum co-founder and CEO Momchil Kyurkchiev told me that this purchase will help his company take “the next step forward in transforming the relationship between brands and their customers.”

A key interest, he indicated, is leveraging Connecto’s intellectual property for Natural Language Processing to add the layer of sentiment analysis in automated conversations.

Leanplum can now better help marketers “move from 1-way to 2-way conversations,” conduct conversations across multiple channels and “automate lifecycle campaigns that are not linear but follow different paths on different channels,” he said.