SurveyMonkey acquires web survey company Usabilla for $80M

SurveyMonkey announced today that it has acquired Usabilla, an Amsterdam-based website and app survey company, for $80 million in cash and stock.

Zander Lurie, CEO at SurveyMonkey, said Usabilla filled in a missing piece in its survey toolkit. “A key product that we identified that we really wanted to add to the portfolio, which is really adjacent to our VOC (voice of the customer) solution is a website feedback collector helping people on the web or on mobile apps really understand what users are doing on their site,” Lurie told TechCrunch.

Usabilla CEO Marc van Agteren says his company is adding a complementary product to SurveyMonkey. “If you compare us to the SurveyMonkey enterprise solution where you create surveys that you need to send out via social media or email, our software sits on a website and instantly provides feedback,” he said. For example, if there is a bug on the page, the user can click the Usabilla tool, capture the area of the page that’s problematic as a screenshot, and send it with a comment to the website or app owner for review.

Conversely the website or app owner could display a question for the visitor to answer before he or she exits. This provides a way to get immediate feedback about design or why they are leaving without finishing a transaction, as examples.

Qualtrics, another survey company was about to go public last fall when it was acquired by SAP for $8 billion, but Lurie doesn’t necessarily see this move as a reaction to that. He said that today’s acquisition was really related to enhancing the company’s enterprise product.

As for Qualtrics, he says that with the acquisition, it is more aligned with SAP now and therefore really being marketed to SAP customers. He sees plenty of room in the survey market with customers of Adobe, Salesforce and Microsoft and others, whom he says probably aren’t looking for an SAP solution. 

With Usabilla, SurveyMonkey gains a stronger foothold in the EU as the company’s headquarters in Amsterdam will become the SurveyMonkey’s largest EU office. The transaction also adds 130 new employees to the SurveyMonkey family, bringing the total number to over 1000. In addition, it can now access Usabilla’s 450 customers, which include Lufthansa, Philips and Vodafone. Lurie said there is some customer overlap, but given that the majority of Usabilla’s customers are outside the U.S, there would likely be a net customer gain from the purchase.

SurveyMonkey was founded in 1999 and went public last September. This is the company’s sixth acquisition and the first in three years, according to Lurie. Usabilla was founded in 2009 and raised a modest $1 million dollars along the way.

The deal is subject to the normal regulatory approval process and is expected to close some time in the second quarter this year.