W2O acquires health social media analytics platform Symplur
W2O in April acquired Symplur, a social media analytics platform exclusively focused on the healthcare sector.
Management says Symplur provides an easy-to-use interface and analytical capabilities that will help make W2O’s data and analytics operating system and technology accessible to a broader range of non-technical users. In the future, W2O will add new features and products to the platform that will further be informed by and benefit its wide range of healthcare clients.
According to W2O, Symplur’s proprietary, purpose-built social media analytics platform – the only tool of its kind on the market designed entirely for healthcare – allows for the rapid and easy identification of social media trends among physicians, patient advocates, life science professionals, media, and other key audiences of interest to healthcare organizations, government entities, and academic institutions. Through a collaboration with the California Life Sciences Association, W2O and Symplur are already utilizing the platform in conjunction with W2O’s proprietary data and technology stack to track COVID-19-specific conversations and trends across the healthcare ecosystem.
“Particularly in these challenging, uncertain times reverberating across global communities and economies, healthcare companies are looking to track essential information in an urgent and immediate manner utilizing data and analytics to discern insights for decision-making,” says Jim Weiss, founder and CEO of W2O. “Symplur’s pioneering technology products turn up the volume on the most important, and often overlooked, voices in healthcare, ultimately engineering a path to a deeper understanding of this dynamic, complex sector. Symplur is another in a series of strategic investments in people, technology and platforms that we’ve made, and intend to make, to strengthen the solutions we provide to clients. W2O now has hundreds of people focused in technology, data science, audience analytics, activation and measurement and we will double down in this space going forward.”
W2O executives say the acquisition is designed to expand the firm’s proprietary data and technology platform and corresponding solutions, further enabling the firm to focus on combining data-rich intelligence with technology to solve clients’ problems in real-time, successfully communicate and market their product offerings, and drive overall value for their brands.
“Insights derived from social media analytics are significantly impacting the entire healthcare ecosystem,” says Audun Utengen, Symplur co-founder and CEO. “Our massive Healthcare Social Graph® platform, which uses machine learning, enables us to extract the most valuable insights to meet the needs of a diverse range of healthcare clients and ultimately drive their priorities forward. This work over many years has helped us expedite the development of relevant, powerful technology platforms like those used to help track critical COVID-19 conversations from authentic, expert sources.”
Symplur’s technology and intelligence reports are currently used by pharmaceutical companies and government agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).
The acquisition, which was completed in partnership with W2O’s private equity partner, New Mountain Capital, marks the firm’s fifth acquisition in nine months. According to W2O executives, Symplur, which now operates as W2O symplur, adds a team of seasoned software architects and developers to the W2O family. Symplur co-founders Utengen and Thomas Lee continue to serve in leadership roles and are key participants in the development of the firm’s audience planning product suite.
“Audun, Thomas and their highly adept team will strengthen our audience planning, intelligence and engagement capabilities while helping enrich our data taxonomy and making our technology platform and offerings more robust, automated, faster and easier to use,” says Adam Cossman, W2O’s group president and managing partner, Technology Products & Solutions. “We look forward to developing additional end-to-end integrated marketing communications tools fueled by technology, taking what we already do for clients and increasingly automating it – turning our services into technology-driven solutions for which our clients are clamoring. To that end, we continue to look for innovative companies and technology that can enrich our offering in these critical areas.”
