CrownPeak Merges, Raises $50M & Appoints New CEO

The former COO of CrownPeak, Jim Yares, has been appointed as the new CEO of the merged company. ActiveStandards' CEO, Simon Lande, and CrownPeak's CEO, Jim Howard, will remain as advisors to the combined company.

“As global enterprises undergo a transformation in digital marketing they are increasingly challenged to deploy and maintain high-quality digital experiences across many touchpoints,” said Jim Yares, CEO of CrownPeak. “Our powerful union with industry leader, ActiveStandards, and support from K1 will allow us to address and surpass this need. We will offer clients the clear solution to manage and deliver rich and consistent content-driven customer experiences.”

Another announcement in connection with the merger has been made by CrownPeak; the company has affirmed a $50 million investment by the West Coast-based venture capital firm, K1 Investment Management, to support the anticipated re-launch as well as future product enhancements.

“The combination of CrownPeak’s and ActiveStandards’ market leading solutions creates a platform that will transform the way brands communicate, relate and connect with their customers,” said Neil Malik, CEO of K1. “The industry is primed for a development of this magnitude and we are excited for continued investment in this partnership.”

The merged company will be run under the CrownPeak name, which will be based in Los Angeles, US and London, UK by having more than 100 employees.

It is not the first time that these two companies have worked together. Prior to the merger, CrownPeak and ActiveStandards launched an integrated offering, named “Active Standard Marketplace Integration”, with several joint clients including some of world’s largest insurance, financial services and pharmaceutical companies.

The integration offers CMS users with an ActiveStandards account the ability to submit website pages in the [Stage] and [Live] workflow environments. CMS users can see the results of over 50 quality and compliance checks on the right side “Integrations” accordion window.

Additional integrated capabilities include:

• A native, cloud shared-service platform to standardize development of websites and Digital Experience Layers across large enterprises.

• The ability to enforce quality and compliance standards across every website, both pre and post-publication. 

• Dashboards providing visibility across every digital touchpoint.

• A flexible deployment architecture that enables digital experiences to be deployed as “front end” across multiple legacy applications to rapidly create modern, high-quality digital experiences.

After the merger, the platform will be called “CrownPeak Digital Quality Management.”

Last year just after Gartner named CrownPeak a "visionary" in the Magic Quadrant, Web Content Management sector, we featured CrownPeak on the Vendor Spotlight segment of the CMS-Connected Show. Sunny Lenarduzzi and Scott Liewehr discussed the significance of them being visionary. 
 

Also in the Magic Quadrant - Web Content Management report, published by Mick MacComascaigh and Jim Murphy on July 29th 2015, the CrownPeak strengths were listed:           

• CrownPeak is an experienced SaaS provider of WCM products, an area experiencing growing demand. It has grown strongly in the past few years, gaining new customers and expanding within its installed base.

• ​CrownPeak's service architecture is fully multitenant, which brings scalable, flexible, pay-as-you-go and continuous innovation qualities. It provides excellent ongoing follow-up with customers to obtain their input into its roadmap and development on, for example, out-of-the-box connectors to third parties.

• CrownPeak's "zero implementation" message and associated features appeal to enterprises challenged with global site management, and to the midmarket — a rapidly growing segment of the WCM market.

Simon Lande, CEO of ActiveStandards, expressed his thoughts about the merger by the following sentences: 

“We are thrilled to be joining forces with CrownPeak as we share a common vision of how to empower global enterprises with the technologies they need to improve their customer experience at scale. Our union takes place at a defining time and uniquely positions us to move the technology frontier forward.” 

It seems like the merged company, CrownPeak will provide faster and more sophisticated solutions for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) DXM. As a result, users will be enabled to deliver seamless customer experience across all digital platforms.