Sprinklr was founded in 2009 by Ragy Thomas, a technology marketing executive previously with email marketing companyBigfoot International. Thomas initially funded the company himself, with servers operating out of the basement of his home. The company's name came from the metaphor of a brand carefully watering their social media presence. Early customers included Cisco, Dell and Virgin America. In March 2012, the company received its first outside funding. In March 2014, Sprinklr acquired Dachis Group, adding abilities for employee advocacy, competitive intelligence, social business consulting services, and content marketing. In May, the company announced a $40 million funding round, bringing it to a $500 million valuation. In August, Sprinklr acquired TBG Digital, one of Facebook's largest ad buying clients, to improve its paid social advertising capability. In September, Sprinklr acquired brand advocacy company Branderati. In March 2015, a $46 million series E funding round gave the company a Unicorn value of $1.17 billion. Also in March, the company announced the launch of its Experience Cloud platform, a way for companies to manage interactions over 23 social media channels and websites. In June, Sprinklr bought text analytics vendor NewBrand. In November, the company acquired data segmentation firm Booshaka. In April 2016, the company acquired social analytics startup Postano. In July, the company announced a $105 million funding round for a valuation of $1.8 billion. In April 2017, the company expanded from social media management to customer experience management, with the launch of new products for its Experience Cloud platform, ranging from social listening tools to content marketing. In October, the company added eight additional products integrated with Experience Cloud. In April 2018, Sprinklr released artificial intelligence capabilities called Sprinklr Intuition, allowing automatic collection and analysis of social media data. In May 2019, the company released Product Insights, an AI capability that automatically categorizes customer comments across social media and review sites about product feedback related to design, packaging, performance or features. In December, the company acquired the social advertising business from ad management company Nanigans. In 2020, Sprinklr offered case tracking services to the Kerala government in India, as part of an app to assist with managing the COVID-19 outbreak. In April 2020, the opposition party to the government accused the company of compromising patient data related to COVID-19 patients, and criticized the services for being awarded without following proper procedures. The company denied the charges, claiming that the data used in its platform is owned and controlled by the government and stored in India, in compliance with India's data privacy regulations. The government confirmed with the Kerala High Court through an affidavit that the Covid-related data was managed by Kerala's Centre for Development of Imaging Technology in the Amazon Web Services cloud, and that no Sprinklr employees had any access to the data.
Acquisition strategy
Sprinklr uses its funding to acquire smaller firms that have tools Sprinklr wanted to build itself. To facilitate integration, Sprinklr discards the purchased technology and has the acquired company's employees develop a native Sprinklr version of the software.
Products
Sprinklr provides a unified SaaS-platform of five products designed to help companies monitor and interact with customers and prospects over social media channels, review sites and messaging channels. The five products are marketing, advertising, research, care and engagement.
Operations
As of October 2018, it was reported that the company had over 1,500 customers. As of December 2019, the company reported over 1,500 employees, and 25 offices in 15 countries, located across North & South America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
