I’m proud to share that Versatile VC’s first portfolio company, Xperiti, is now also our first exit! Xperiti is an expert network redesigned with modern technology. Congratulations to the cofounders: Yadin Soffer, Mor Raphael Shabtai, and Yanay Tevet!
Ipsos announced today the acquisition of Xperiti, with operations across the US, Israel and Asia. Xperiti will remain a separate entity, with a focus on innovation. Ipsos is one of the largest market research and polling companies globally, operating in 90 markets and employing over 18,000 people, serving over 5,000 customers. Founded in France in 1975, Ipsos has been listed on the Euronext Paris since 1999. Other VCs backing Xperiti include Dan Aks from IBI Tech Fund and Rafi Gidron.
We took a position in Xperiti in January 2022, when the VC markets were still frothy. As a VC value investor, I particularly appreciated Xperiti’s scrappy ability to get a lot done with a little. (In the past year, more VCs seem to have adopted this worldview.) In its history, Xperiti raised less then $2m. On that tiny nut, they built a global team; won recurring revenue from global institutional clients like Nomura; built a highly efficient, automated infrastructure; and eventually merited an acquisition from a publicly-traded firm which recognized their unique strategic value. Although the exact financials aren’t publicly discloseable, I can say that the exit valuation was multiples higher than the valuation back in January 2022. Ironically, we took a position when market valuations were high and exited when valuations were generally lower.
Xperiti’s CEO, Yadin Soffer, originally approached me cold several years ago: “I recently came across your article here that addresses several discussion points of ours at Xperiti.” I turned down Xperiti because they didn’t then have the full, right team in place and they were too early. Yadin later re-approached, seeking advice and capital. “I was looking for someone who would push back on me. You were one of the few people who gave us specific feedback and advice.”
Xperiti is powered by its internal AI-driven Search & Recruit engine that taps into an open network of over 1 billion global professionals across 130 countries and over 90 industries. eToro’s #1 most followed investor posted a powerful video testimonial. Xperiti’s capability to recruit experts in real-time, powered by scraping and natural language processing (NLP) technology, combined with Ipsos’s global scale and research capabilities, will allow the combined firm to redefine how B2B research is collected and analyzed.This acquisition will directly improve Ipsos’ efficiency, speed for experts’ recruitment, scale and optimize its B2B research capabilities globally, and grow into adjacent offerings by building a large-scale, global B2B Expert Insights Platform.
Ipsos tried dozens of expert sample providers over the years. Xperiti’s hyper-personalized approach to automated expert recruitment at scale raises the quality level of B2B qualitative and quantitative research, and allows Xperiti to outperform competitors in scale, speed and price without compromising on quality.
Ipsos expects multiple benefits from the acquisition of Xperiti:
- Improve the efficiency, effectiveness and speed for experts recruitment through Xperiti’s platform and algorithms
- Scale and optimize B2B capabilities globally, especially for Ipsos clients across technology, media, healthcare, CPG and financial services.
- Grow into adjacent offerings by building the first large scale, global B2B Expert Insights Platform, combining the latest Large Language Models technologies with the largest volumes of qual and quant research across every sector.
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