The Start of Something New

My company, Node, was acquired by SugarCRM today.

Node is an AutoML AI platform startup. We built Node to democratize AI and help small and medium businesses compete with big tech companies. Two of the disadvantages smaller companies have are fewer engineers and less data. Node was designed to address these weaknesses with a unique data augmentation system on top of a machine learning system with models optimized for less data.

Since 2014, Node made a lot of progress in building this general purpose machine learning system. It was a technically challenging problem to solve, but also expensive. Our fearless founder had raised over 43 million dollars. As with all start ups, we needed to identify a product market fit and faced pressure to find it quickly during the pandemic. We narrowed our scope to concentrate on the sales domain where we had traction, leading us to SugarCRM.

SugarCRM is a sales software company building a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Their biggest competitor is Salesforce, who added artificial intelligence to their platform by acquiring Metamind, now Salesforce Research, in 2016. By acquiring Node and adding the power of prediction to their platform, SugarCRM can better compete with Salesforce and use AI to differentiate them from other competitors.

The acquisition is a win-win for Node and SugarCRM. On a personal note, I’m excited to experience an acquisition, a Silicon Valley rite of passage, first-hand.

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