Klue acquires DoubleCheck to advance win-loss analysis

B2B SaaS venture Klue has announced the acquisition of Massachusetts-based DoubleCheck Research. Through this deal, Klue will better support clients with win-loss analysis, a feature that improves win rates by examining why clients are winning and losing business. Jason Smith, CEO and co-founder of Klue, told Vancouver Tech Journal that this move will further differentiate the company from its competitors, as no other providers currently offer this capacity.

Vancouver-based Klue’s platform supports sales, marketing, and leadership teams to excel against their competitors — a field known as competitive enablement. “Every company has a differentiated view of why they're better or worse against the competition,” said Smith. “But those competitors are constantly changing. And so how do we stay on top of that, and give people the ammo they need in that ever changing environment?”

Klue gathers intelligence from a number of spaces to advance competitive enablement: the client, the client’s competitors, and now, with the acquisition of DoubleCheck, the client’s buyers, through win-loss analysis. This feature allows clients to better capture and analyze in-depth intelligence around why clients win certain deals and lose others. “Bringing win/loss into Klue’s enablement platform also ensures these insights don’t just live with leadership, but make their way to teams across the entire organization to help them win more,” said Ryan Sorley, CEO and founder of DoubleCheck.

Smith said the acquisition cost Klue in the “low-double-digit millions” of dollars. Klue spent a number of years working with DoubleCheck, initially hiring the company (among other win-loss analysis companies) as a consultancy, said Smith. “I've been on stage with Ryan, we’ve spoken at a number of events together for years now,” he added. “The more you talk to somebody, the more you realize there's a unified view of what the future is, which is that product marketers are going to need a unified platform to do [competitive enablement].”

Globally, there are a number of other providers in the competitive intelligence space, but Klue is carving out a new space with its platform, said Smith. “[Competitive] intelligence is nothing new. But [it] has rarely been actionable. It's been like a lookup database in the past. So now we're making that actionable.” Klue has been largely adopted by enterprise B2B clients, with current customers including Adobe, HubSpot, and Shopify.

Klue previously raised a CAD $79 million Series B in 2021, and a CAD $19.7 million Series A in 2020. This year, Smith eyes further growth, thanks to the existing capital. “We’ve run the company incredibly capital-efficiently. And so we have many, many, many, many, many years of runway, which puts us in a unique position,” he added. “We intend to continue to hire aggressively, somewhere between probably 50 and 100 people again next year, we intend to look at more acquisitions, judiciously.”