Breaking: Sydney startup Netcomber.com acquired by Profound Networks

Startup Daily has confirmation that Netcomber.com has just been acquired by Profound Networks.

Netcomber.com was founded by Sydney based Luke Metcalfe, who owns Rapid Intelligence and also publishes NationMaster.com and Andre Weyher, who was part of Matt Cutts’ famous Search Quality team at Google later joined to head up PR and Marketing and drive the business forward. They launched the site in 2012.

Netcomber uses its technology to identify the links between websites that on the surface appear to be unrelated. To do this, the proprietary technology scans hundreds of millions of websites identifying thousands of unique features that can be used to correlate website ownership. This is fed into a live queryable database of 253 million sites.

Netcomber.com has an established client base of law enforcement organizations that investigate linkage between websites engaged in illegal activities. Profound Networks will apply much of Netcomber’s technology to identify linkage between websites and their corporate owners.

“Linking companies and their affiliated website domains together has significant value for what is called master data management” said Blake Sitney, founder and president of Profound Networks.

“Enterprises make better decisions by understanding the full corporate family tree of their customers, prospects, vendors, and partners. Corporate linkage in the private sector and in emerging markets is especially valuable where sourcing this data is notoriously difficult.”

Profound Networks maintains a comprehensive database of every routable IP address globally and most active websites on the internet, providing insight into how quickly company networks are growing, as well as which service providers they are using for cloud, web hosting, web analytics, eCommerce, advertising, email, marketing automation tools, security services, and more.

To make this domain-centric data actionable, Profound Networks develops processes to map domains to their owner. Currently 10 million unique domains and growing are tied to their organizational entity. The addition of Netcomber technology greatly expands Profound Networks’ ability to link websites together and by extension, the organisations and companies that own them.

“The integration of Netcomber’s ‘domain clustering’ capabilities will enable Profound Networks to become a leader in the emerging area of global digital corporate linkage,” said Sitney.

On the acquisition, Luke Metcalf told Startup Daily, “I’m excited to be acquired by a company that’s had such traction in the enterprise sector. I’m excited that NetComber’s deep web technology can add another prong to their business”.

The details of how much the acquisition was worth are not being revealed, though Metcalfe told Startup Daily that he is ‘happy’.