Jim Kaskade, the CEO of Infochimps, had approached Mike Lawrie, his counterpart at Computer Sciences Corp. (NYSE: [[ticker:CSC]]), to see if he would agree to be an advisor to the Austin, TX, startup.
Five months later, the men would be announcing that Falls Church, VA-based CSC would be acquiring Infochimps. “By joining forces with CSC, we together will deliver one of the most powerful analytic platforms to the enterprise in an unprecedented amount of time,” Kaskade wrote late Tuesday in a company blog post.
He declined to provide details on what CSC paid in the transaction. “Shareholders were well compensated,” he said.
Infochimps, which is based in Austin and Silicon Valley, is a developer of cloud-based, big-data analysis software which is used to slice-and-dice enterprise data. With the acquisition, Infochimps becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Virginia-based company and reports to CSC’s big data and analytics business unit. Infochimps’ team will remain intact, including current leadership, who will stay on and operate as before.
“The choice wasn’t an easy one,” Kaskade said in an interview late Tuesday evening. “We’re a small player going after enterprise Fortune 1000 companies. We knocked on a lot of doors and closed on a lot of those deals, but we also lost some.”
Joining CSC would give Infochimps a brand that would allow it to leap over its “fledgling startup” reputation to leverage the larger company’s brand as it continues to pursue the big customers, he added. “Let’s do this now and be part of the front of the pack,” Kaskade said.
Kaskade, who has been at the helm of Infochimps for about 18 months, said he was impressed with Lawrie’s stewardship at CSC. “I was looking to expand our advisors from folks on the outside, for guidance during our hyper growth,” he said. “We realized almost immediately that our strategy was 100 percent aligned.”
Infochimps’ strengths tied directly into CSC’s investments in cybersecurity, cloud, and big data, he added. “We’re a big data cloud that addresses cyber and many other applications. We hit two if not three of those priorities.”
The news of the acquisition first broke through a string of congratulatory messages on Twitter, tweets that continued hours later from across the country.
Infochimps has raised $5.8 million and was backed by DFJ Mercury, Anduin Ventures, ff Venture Capital, and Stage One Capital. “When CSC begins to insert the Infochimps DNA into its global staff of 90,000 employees, focused on bringing Big Data to a broad enterprise customer base, powerful things are bound to happen,” Kaskade wrote in his blog.
