World's leading customer relationship management (CRM) software maker Salesforce.com has acquired Dimdim, Inc., a US and India based web conferencing company. The acquisition of Dimdim is for approximately $31 million in cash, net of cash acquired.
VCCircle was the first to report in November that Salesforce.com is close to acquiring Dimdim.
Dimdim, founded in 2007, had raised a total of $8.4 million in two rounds of venture funding from the same set of investors which included Mumbai-based Nexus Venture Partners, Index Ventures and Draper Richards - some of whom have backed companies like Skype, Hotmail, and MySQL. This is Nexus' second exit in the past 6 months - in August 2010, it sold its stake in OLX when South African media giant Naspers global online classifieds firm.
Dimdim’s co-founders are DD Ganguly (CEO), who was founder and CEO of Advanced Internet Management (acquired by Computer Associates), and Prakash Khot, co-founder and CTO of DimDim, who previously led CA’s radio-frequency identification (RFID) Group as CTO.
Dimdim crossed 6 million users in August 2010 and during the year partnered with Novell for Novell Conferencing and Nortel for its Hosted IP Communications Solution. The company has reportedly laid off all non-core employees post the acquisition.
Salesforce.com will use the acquisition to bring new real-time communication capabilities to the Chatter collaboration platform, mirroring the proven Facebook model of combining collaboration and communication into an integrated service, it said in a statement.
“Facebook has fundamentally changed the way we communicate in our personal lives,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world’s most popular Internet site.”
Salesforce.com is an NYSE listed enterprise cloud computing company, which offers products like customer relationship management services as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. It also has platforms like Force.com, a cloud platform for building and running business apps, and Chatter, an enterprise collaboration application. It has a market capitlisation of nearly $19 billion.
Salesforce, founded in 1999, has $1.3 billion in revenue in the fiscal year ended in January 2010 and has about 2,500 employees in San Francisco, where it's headquartered. The acquisition of Dimdim will help Salesforce integrate web collaboration services in its existing offerings.