Smarsh Acquires Digital Reasoning

Smarsh has acquired Digital Reasoning, a provider of natural language processing (NLP), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), bringing together its own digital communications content capture, archiving, supervision and e-discovery with Digital Reasoning's analytics to help companies spot risks before they happen and uncover strategic insights from large volumes of data in real time. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Smarsh manages more than 3 billion messages daily across email, social media, mobile/text messaging, instant messaging and collaboration, web, and voice channels.

"Smarsh's and Digital Reasoning's combined capabilities equip customers with an entirely new expertise that we are calling communications intelligence. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning helps firms more efficiently supervise and mitigate risk at scale and will now enable them to analyze their electronic communications to uncover business intelligence that can fuel sales and other revenue drivers," said Brian Cramer, CEO of Smarsh, in a statement. "The ongoing pandemic and its impact on how and where people work has accelerated long-term trends that were already well underway The exploding volume, velocity, and variety of electronic communications are creating greater risks for firms, while also presenting opportunities to leverage communications data to spot risks before they happen and identify new insights to drive fresh growth initiatives. These conditions are creating a large divide between firms investing to harvest data-driven insights and leverage data to manage risk and those who are falling behind. This will bear out in earnings and share prices in the years to come."

"In this new world of remote work, a company's digital communications infrastructure is now the most essential one for it to function and thrive. Smarsh and Digital Reasoning provide the only validated and complete solution for companies to understand what is being said in any digital channel and in any language. This enables them to quickly identify things like fraud, racism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and other misconduct that can create substantial compliance risk," said Tim Estes, founder and CEO of Digital Reasoning, in a statement.

The combined capabilities of Smarsh and Digital Reasoning will enable customers to do the following:

• Strengthen lexicon-driven supervision with AI-powered surveillance across digital communications channels;
• Automate surveillance across collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, and Workplace by Facebook;
• Minimize the amount of communications people must review;
• Leverage massive amounts of data for insights that can drive business growth; and
• Identify troublesome patterns or trends of employee behavior before they cause irreparable harm.