NetBase Solutions Inc. and Quid Inc. on Tuesday said they have combined to form a new Bay Area-based consumer and market intelligence software company called NetBase Quid.

The companies plan to retain both NetBase's current headquarters location in Santa Clara and Quid's in San Francisco, along with offices in New York, London and Taipei.

Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.

The companies had raised a combined total of more than $300 million funding. NetBase's investors included Thomvest Ventures and WestSummit Capital. Quid's included Artis Ventures, Plug and Play and Salesforce Ventures.

NetBase employed 162 people at the end of last year, according to PitchBook Data. Quid employed 125. The companies said they will have about 250 employees going forward.

NetBase Chairman and CEO Peter Caswell will keep those roles at NetBase Quid. Quid CEO Bob Goodson will be president.

"From a purely legal standpoint, NetBase is the acquirer in this deal," Caswell told the Business Journal. "But neither party needed to do this. The upside that was seen by both boards was significant enough that we all made a decision that this made sense for both companies."

He declined to say how many jobs were becoming redundant in the combination, saying only that this is inevitable in such deals.

The companies said their platform will deliver contextual insights that reveal business trends from across all forms of structured and unstructured data. It will do this by aggregating, analyzing and visualizing billions of indexed resources — from social media posts, consumer reviews, product reviews, news articles to business filings, to patent applications and forums.

Caswell said both companies were already dealing largely with the same customers, without knowing it.

Two of those customers are Coca-Cola and the public relations and marketing firm of FleishmanHillard.

"Merging Quid and NetBase will help enable the next wave of innovative customer analytics," Pamela Mittoo, Coke's manager of technical consumer research said in the Tuesday announcement. "This new company will provide the ultimate resource in understanding consumer context."

FleishmanHillard Senior Vice President Brian Mossop called the deal a "game changer for our business and our clients."

"Both NetBase and Quid enable the strategic work we do at FleishmanHillard," he said. "Combining NetBase's and Quid's contextual AI and breadth of data sources will give us unparalleled visibility into any landscape analysis, including our clients' brand coverage, the industries they serve, and new areas of opportunity for our clients and their customers."

This announcement was originally released in Silicon Valley Business Journal here: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2020/01/28/netbase-quid-merger-acquisition.html