Raleigh-based Pendo announced Wednesday morning it has acquired Zelta AI, a New York company that collects customer feedback and analyzes it for clients, for an undisclosed amount.
The deal expands Pendo’s artificial intelligence operation. The company has released nearly a dozen artificial intelligence features and products in the past year, including Pendo Listen, which helps companies build and launch new products.
Zelta AI will become part of Pendo Listen.
“Like Pendo Listen, it leverages AI to glean insights from qualitative data to help product teams build products that deliver on business outcomes,” said CEO and co-founder Todd Olson in a blog post Wednesday morning. “In the coming months, we plan to integrate the technology into Pendo Listen, giving our customers a more complete understanding of their customers, and more product data from which AI can uncover insights.”
The last Pendo acquisition was in February 2022 when it acquired Mind the Product, a global product community headquartered in London.
Pendo says its customers are increasingly using artificial intelligence in its offerings. More than 20% of customers who created an in-app guide in the last 90 days are leveraging AI to write or localize the content to quickly build valuable guides, for example.
And one in four Pendo customers are benefiting from AI suggestions that uncover where users are getting stuck in their applications and suggest actions to help users complete the journey.
Olson teamed up with former product leaders at Red Hat, Cisco and Google to launch Pendo in October 2013. Since then, the company has raised $356 million and has 900 employees in eight offices. It has been exploring an initial public offering and boosting its international business to make it more attractive to investors.
More than 10,000 companies use Pendo’s software and analytics. The company is valued at $2.6 billion, and its investors include Tiger Global, Salesforce Ventures, Core Capital Partners and Sapphire Ventures.
“It is a really exciting time to be in product,” said Olson in the blog post. “For too long, product teams have been either drowning in data or flying blind without it. With Pendo Listen + Zelta, there’s no excuse for either scenario.”
Zelta AI co-founders Pierce Healy, Conor McGuiness and Mick Cunningham started the company in 2022. They will join Pendo in its New York City office and create an AI center of excellence.