Foxintelligence (HX16) gets acquired by NielsenIQ

Foxintelligence (eF16), the market intelligence solution, has been acquired by NielsenIQ. Launched in 2016, Foxintelligence marks our 6th exit, after Textmaster, Mention, Mailjet, Hivy, and Briq. Their acquisition by NielsenIQ will allow the company to offer a more comprehensive and integrated vision of the online and offline marketplace.

A story of firsts…

It all started a cold week of November back in 2016. Edouard, now CEO and co-founder of Foxintel, was introduced to us by common friends. At the time he was finishing up work at a big eCommerce company and was trying to figure out his next move. He was getting attractive proposals to become Chief Digital Officer of big corporates but was also thinking of embarking on his own entrepreneurial journey. After a couple of discussions, Edouard decided to join eFounders in December 2016 and launch his own company. We’re very proud to have been the catalyst to launching his successful entrepreneurial journey. With hindsight, we can say that moving to the 9th arrondissement of Paris provided a better alternative than going to La Défense!

Foxintelligence marked a first for us at the time. It was our first “Lightstack” project where entrepreneurs came to us with their own idea. Completely different than our model thus far where we’d be the ones coming up with ideas. Edouard brought his eCommerce experience, an area that’s decidedly different to SaaS, while we contributed our B2B SaaS expertise and together as a team, propelled Foxintelligence further. Then Nicolas, CTO and co-founder, joined shortly after.

The vision was to generate the best market intelligence while protecting data privacy. And we can proudly tip our hats to the team for delivering on that. Foxintelligence works by measuring eCommerce activity based on 100% anonymized data from consumers through dedicated apps, and deriving from these data reliable market intelligence insights which are then delivered through a B2B SaaS platform.

We weren’t alone in thinking this could create huge opportunities. Later in 2016, Foxintelligence raised the first round of funding, and a year later raised a €6 million Series A, which, at the time, was a pretty hefty round of funding for such a young company!

Foxintel also marked our first time experimenting with B2C for the Go-To-Market strategy. We needed to collect as much eCommerce data as possible, and one of the ways to do that was for people to log in to our platform with their email address so we could then analyze their e-receipts in a completely anonymized way. So we launched Misterfox, a product that allowed people to get reimbursed if they had ever gotten on a late train (and with 9000 late trains a year — we got a good amount of interest). We went into full viral marketing mode and posted the flyer below in trains and stations. We also managed to secure a lot of press coverage. We can proudly say that our foray into B2C marketing was a success!

…and of resilience.

But it wasn’t always easy. The Foxintel story is also a story of resilience. The product relied on getting access to emails to collect anonymized data and some pretty big threats along the way jeopardized Foxintel more than a few times. But they persevered. Edouard and Nicolas, then joined by third cofounder Florian, worked even harder and found solutions to unexpected issues.

Today, Foxintelligence is the largest e-commerce measurement and consumer data analytics company in Europe. It operates Europe’s largest GDPR-compliant consumer panel, boasting over 600,000 active online buyers in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. They’ve come a long way from their young start in 2016 and we couldn’t be prouder of the whole team!

Our sixth exit

Fast forward to today and they’ve been acquired by NielsenIQ, a leader in consumer behavior analytics. By joining forces, NielsenIQ and Foxintel strive to approach e-commerce holistically. Foxintel will be instrumental in this strategy, by uncovering the online blind spots like marketplaces, category specialists, direct-to-consumer, quick-commerce, among others, to provide full-market coverage.

For us, the acquisition marks our sixth exit after Textmaster, Mention, Mailjet, Hivy, and Briq. While exits aren’t our end goal, it is a wonderful milestone in the journey of a company, especially when it’s with a market leader like NielsenIQ who will, without any doubt, have the capacity to advance the Foxintel mission of bringing groundbreaking market intelligence data to clients everywhere.