Financial software powerhouse Intuit Inc. today announced that it’s buying Origami Logic Inc., an Accel-backed marketing analytics startup.

The deal marks the veteran company’s first acquisition under Chief Executive Sasan Goodarzi, who took the helm in January. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Seven-year-old Origami Logic offers a cloud service that helps companies measure the performance of their marketing campaigns. The offering isn’t an obvious fit for Intuit, which develops tax preparation software and related financial products. Marianna Tessel, Intuit’s chief technology officer, explained in a blog post that the company is not buying Origami Logic for its marketing features but rather to obtain the data management technology under the hood.

Origami Logic has built out an end-to-end analytics system to support its service. Users can aggregate information from a variety of sources, integrate the disparate records into a unified dataset and fix issues such as duplicate entries or missing fields. Once the file is ready to be processed, analytics teams can harness a Python-based query editor to look for useful patterns.

The platform can be used to identify trends such as changes in a organization’s sales volume, as well for more general analytics tasks like customer segmentation. Intuit said it will use the technology to enhance its internal data management infrastructure. The company is hoping that Origami Logic will help it better process the vast amounts of information generated by its customers.

As the largest provider of accounting software in the U.S., Intuit faces some unique challenges when it comes to analytics. In her most recent appearance on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE (below), Tessel said her team is grappling with questions such as “How do we use all this great data and [also] respect privacy, how do we use the right data to give even more value to our customers and how we do apply machine learning and AI?”

The acquisition of Origami Logic should help Intuit in the latter department as well, since the startup’s platform uses machine learning for certain analytics operations. Intuit has made AI a bigger priority since Goodarzi took over as CEO, with the executive stating recently that he sees an opportunity to add more automation features to core products such as TurboTax.

Intuit anticipates that the acquisition of Origami Logic will close this quarter. The company doesn’t expect the deal to affect its 2019 earnings guidance, though the price tag was likely fairly substantial given that Origami Logic has raised over $64 million in funding.

Photo: Intuit