Citrix has announced that it has acquired Sapho at a reported $200 million in cash. Sapho is considered the only employee experience portal that was designed for the digital workplace. Sapho solves the problem where employees at companies become frustrated and less productive by using hard-to-use applications. And Sapho’s employee portal platform is used by companies like CBS, Google, HCL, and SurveyMonkey.
As part of the deal, Sapho co-founders Fouad ElNaggar and Peter Yared and the company’s employees across San Bruno, California and Czech Republic will be joining Citrix according to VentureBeat. Prior to the acquisition, Sapho raised $27.9 million in funding across 5 rounds, according to Crunchbase data. Investors in Sapho include Caffeinated Capital, Alsop Louie Partners, AME Cloud Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Morado Ventures, and Shawn Merani.
In 2016, Sapho launched a micro app platform that run on smartphones and PCs to help quickly drive the completion of actionable tasks. These micro apps will be integrated into Citrix Workspace so that actionable notifications will be surfaced for employees and it makes getting things done more efficiently. This is done by sending notifications with buttons and visuals rather than natural language processing. This makes it easier than having to switch between multiple apps to get work done.
Companies are able to quickly surface personalized tasks from existing systems and deliver them to any device, intranet or collaboration tool. Sapho has pre-defined APIs to integrate with leading enterprise applications and over 50 micro-apps for applications like Salesforce, Concur, Salesforce, Google Drive, Outlook, etc.
And Sapho’s Employee Experience portal integrates with enterprise systems running businesses. For example, the SAP Concur micro-app is used for easily submitting requests, receiving notifications about request statuses, and taking actions right from your enterprise portal. And a Sapho bot for Microsoft Teams is used to integrate multiple SaaS platforms into one bot.
“Sapho and Citrix share a vision that technology can improve employee experience by helping people to be more productive,” said ElNaggar in a statement. “Our technologies create an intelligent environment that solves productivity challenges that employees and companies are facing by organizing work in a single place, guiding work by bringing micro-apps into the environment and automating tasks to increase time for employees to do value-added work. And together, we can deliver a truly intelligent workspace that redefines the way work gets done.”
“In today’s tight labor market, the advantage goes to companies that can recruit, develop and engage employees better than the competition,” added Citrix’s EVP of Business Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer Tim Minahan. “Employee experience will ultimately determine winners and losers and Citrix is committed to delivering intelligent digital workspaces that give companies an edge.”
Citrix is not the only company that acquired a bot company this week. Earlier this week, Microsoft acquired enterprise bot company XOXCO.
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