The seven-year-old personalised web content dashboard service Netvibes has confirmed it has been acquired by 3D and CAD software maker Dassault Systèmes.
Netvibes was co-founded by French digital entrepreneur Tariq Krim in 2005 to push the notion of a start page for content feeds and widgets, and took €12 million from Index, Accel and individuals in 2006.
While that idea has not gained huge traction with consumers, Netvibes says it provides “dashboard intelligence” for corporate and government clients including Coca-Cola, L’Oreal, Digitas and the McCann Worldgroup, and services more than 500 million web apps per month.
“We believe that the future of business is dashboard intelligence, which will help companies understand everything that’s going on across the real-time Web and inside and outside their organization,” current CEO Freddy Mini writes.
“To continue to grow and to achieve our ambitious vision, we needed an ambitious partner. Our revenue is strong and we were never for sale, but we found an exceptional partner.”
The fit looks strange. Dassault Systèmes, with 10,000 staff, works mostly in 3D graphics and simulation design. But its CEO Bernard Charlès says Netvibes is “a perfect fit”. “It will connect and combine products, usages, internal and external data sources, user intelligence and social tagging,” he says in the announcement post.
Netvibe’s basic and paid services will remain operational.