Salesforce to buy Krux to add behavioural tracking capabilities to its portfolio

Salesforce.com has planned to buy user data management platform Krux Digital. The buyout will allow businesses to process even more data in their CRM systems. The acquisition will also allow customers of both Salesforce and Krux to feed "billions of new signals" to Salesforce Einstein, a suite of AI-based tools for building predictive models, Chavez said.

Unveiled two weeks ago, Salesforce Einstein will include functions such as predictive lead scoring and recommended case classification. Some functions will be available for free, while others will be charged for based on data volume and user numbers.

Krux describes its business as "capturing, unifying, and activating data signatures across every device and every channel, in real time". Essentially, it performs the tracking underlying behavioural advertising, handling 200 billion "data collection events" on three billion browsers and devices (desktop, mobile, tablet and set-top) each month.

“With that staggering volume of data, Krux will extend the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s audience segmentation and targeting capabilities to power consumer marketing with even more precision, at scale," Krux CEO & Co-Founder Tom Chavez wrote on the company’s blog.

Businesses already using Krux to track their customers include media companies BBC, HBO, NBC Universal and DailyMotion; publishers The Guardian and The Financial Times, and food and drink companies ABInBev, Mondelez International, Kelloggs and Keurig.

According to a filing it made with the SEC, Salesforce will pay around US$340 million in cash and a similar amount in shares to Krux. The deal is expected to be closed by the end of January.