SugarCRM acquires high-profile start-up Node

AI-as-a-Service platform Node has had no trouble attracting attention since its founding by Falon Fatemi in 2014. Fatemi, hired by Google as a sales strategist at the age of 19, their youngest employee, and has picked up a string of awards as a fast-rising female tech entrepreneur.

Thumbs up from Mark Cuban. Node also got recognition, and substantial funding, from Mark Cuban, quoted as saying: “Node’s greatest value is that it has proven it can drive sales immediately after installation and implementation.”

Now Node has attracted a purchaser, SugarCRM, the marketing-sales-service platform which leverages “time-aware” customer data to support CX. Fatemi will be moving on to pursue other opportunities.

The value of Node. Node has the capability of applying deep learning models to both CRM data, and large quantities of data derived from external sources. This has advantages over modeling based on CRM data alone, which can be inaccurate or incomplete. Node estimates that its algorithms identify signals with over 80% greater accuracy than rule-based approaches.

Analyst Paul Greenberg, president of the 56 Group said in a release: “Sugar has been a fantastic platform at its heart. Adding Node has the potential to bring impressive predictive accuracy to Sugar’s platform and products.” He also told MarTech Today: “It was a valuable acquisition for SugarCRM—particularly for them—because it filled a gap that they needed filled.” The value lies in Node’s capability to go beyond just customer data “to do its ‘predictive’ thing,” he explained.

The ‘predictive’ thing includes:

• Identifying customers most likely to churn;
• Predicting likelihood to convert;
• Recommending add-on products to increase average sale size; and
• Improving engagement models through predictive case routing.

Why we care. It’s news in itself that Node is no longer following an independent path. This is also another example of how gaps in a CX suite can be filled by the right acquisition.