Hootsuite announced its second acquisition of the year today, as the company aims to get its business back on track with a new CEO at the helm. The social-media-management software company said it is paying $60 million for Heyday, a Montreal-based company that develops AI to help brands communicate with customers over platforms like Facebook Messenger; Heyday has raised US$6.7 million in venture capital to date, according to PitchBook. 

Hootsuite also bought digital customer-service platform Sparkcentral in January.

The series of acquisitions comes amid a transition period for Vancouver-based Hootsuite. In 2018, after Facebook and Twitter made changes to their platforms that hurt the company’s business, it reportedly held conversations with a handful of private equity firms about a potential sale, but abandoned the process after offers came in lower than the valuation it was seeking. Last year, Hootsuite hired former Zendesk executive Tom Keiser as its new CEO, taking the reins from founder Ryan Holmes, who stepped down in November 2019. Keiser said in January that Hootsuite was considering an IPO, but needed to show consistent growth before it could pursue the option.

If all goes well, the acquisitions could give Hootsuite the growth it’s looking for. Richard Hungerford, Hootsuite’s VP of corporate development and strategy, said purchasing Heydey will allow the company to expand into two new product categories: social commerce, and AI and automation. “These are two big pieces that we wanted to fill and that were high on our wishlist,” Hungerford said. In addition to handling customer-service inquiries, Heyday’s AI can also send customers photos or videos of products they might be interested in buying. At the same time, Hootsuite plans to take advantage of the Heyday team’s expertise in AI to build new products using its massive dataset about its clients.

The product expansion would involve more hires in Montreal, where the company plans to expand its footprint even further after acquiring Heyday. Founded in 2008, Hootsuite has roughly 1,100 employees globally and more than US$200 million in annual recurring revenue. Hootsuite’s bigger size has forced its leadership to change its approach from the company’s earlier days, Hungerford said, an effort that the new CEO is leading.

“We had a lot of values that made sense for an earlier-stage startup, and so as Tom [Keiser] came in with a fresh set of eyes, we really looked at, ‘How do we rethink what are [our] guiding principles as an organization?’” Hungerford said. “We’re much more global now. Things have changed.”