I read the news this morning that Sysomos has been acquired by Marketwire.   TechCrunch does not disclose the selling price but StartupNorth puts the price at more than 25 million dollars that Scout Labs was just acquired for.   Now we can only guess when Brandwatch (Giles Palmer must be happy) and even Radian6 will be sold.  According to StartupNorth:

As usual, the terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but we do know that, like BumpTop, Sysomos was funded out of the Growthworks Commercialization fund. That would put this deal at well north of $25million, likely landing in at around $35million.  Sysomos was also funded by Ontario Centres of Excellence, who were also instrumental in supporting BumpTop. In fact, like Bumptop, Sysomos also originated at the University of  Toronto and does retain some useful and unique IP.

This is the second exit for Scott Pelton, who only took over managing the Growthwork’s comm fund in 2008. By Canadian VC standards (or any for that matter), he is on fire and, by my estimate, is chalking up one of the best IRRs that the business has seen yet in this country. Who says VC is dead?

Sysomos has made rapid progress since taking investment and has managed to consistently raise the bar of social media monitoring standards. No doubt that MarketWire is looking for ways to develop beyond their more traditional media monitoring solution to something that offers more social media coverage. Sysomos’ strong analytics capability will no doubt be useful to MarketWire customers as well.

Dave Fleet has a list of all the Social Media Monitoring companies that have been acquired of late.

In recent months we’ve seen several interesting moves within the social media monitoring/social CRM space.

Company	Acquired by	Date
Techrigy	Alterian	July 2009
Filtrbox	Jive Software	January 2010
Buzzgain	Meltwater	February 2010
Biz360	Attensity	April 2010
DNA13	CNW Group	April 2010
Scout Labs	Lithium Technologies	May 2010

(Note: CNW Group is a 76design client. Thanks to William Johnson for the DNA13 pointer and Steve Dodd for the Buzzgain tip.)

Now we’re seeing another significant player in a similar move, as Toronto-based Sysomos is acquired by news wire service Marketwire.

I believe by years end there will be but a few companies in this space that would not have been acquired.   In fact, Social Media Monitoring, by itself, will have become a commodity – and may already be one.  Only merging with additional data will allow these platforms to grow into what they need to be in order to succeed in the long run.