Exalead, the French web company that built marketing-leading accommodation portal ViaMichelin, is under new ownership following its acquisition by 3D technology firm Dassault Systemes.
The deal is worth around Euro 135 million and completed this week.
Exalead has a number of products but is probably best known for its CloudView system (as used by ViaMichelin), something Dassault is keen to integrate into its own 3D technology system.
Exalead co-founder François Bourdoncle says:
“The combination with 3D represents the next generation of information technology for lifelike experiences. With Dassault Systèmes, the number of people who will benefit from our technology will explode.”
The ViaMichelin deal was a major breakthrough into the travel sector for Exalead given the profile of the client.
The CloudView system was used to combine database information, web content, user-generated content and dynamic mapping for 15 million points of interest, including hotels, restaurants and attractions.
This was combined with geolocalisation, clustering, results navigation and proximity search to create the new ViaMichelin portal – a site which currently processes around 800 queries per second.
Other travel clients include Carlson Wagonlit and RealTravel.com.
Anyone has any idea why the valuation was 135M Euro?
@pedro – that was the acquisition price announced today.
You think too high? Too low?
Exalead is offering both “enterpise search system” (through a customisable desktop search and a web based search) and Internet based search (they crawl the web …). So their business model is not only based on advertising. They also created a year ago a social platform available for companies.
Finally Exalead is highly involved in EU R&D programs. So their know how (and may be patents) are interesting for a company like Dassault System, that wants to become the french cloud champion. Dassault Systems is willing to bring Cloud to French and EMEA companies. Dassault system communicated also a lot on their intraware (intranet using virtual world technologies).
And exalead is more and more positionning itself in 3D and geoloc search which is very interesting for Dassault system. Imagine if you can link 3D Cad systems (like CATIA), with a GIS (Geo Information system) and with a search engine. This could be a revolution in how architects build/maintain buildings, roads, etc. Just a guess …