Sales and marketing has seen a huge boom in the last several years, fueled by developments in user experience and design, innovations around how companies can parse and leverage big data analytics to understand more about their target audiences and tech to connect with them effectively. That's also led to a profusion of startups and scaling-up mega-businesses in the space -- as well as the inevitable consolidation to bring those two groups closer together. In the latest development, two scaling startups in sales intelligence in Europe -- Germany's Echobot and Finland's Leadfeeder -- are merging and together have raised €180 million ($190 million at today's rates) to fuel their next steps.

Together the companies have some 8,500 customers, with an emphasis on working with companies in Europe. Leadfeeder focuses on providing tools to help companies understand who is coming to look at their tech on the web to provide better insights into who to target for sales and marketing opportunities. Echobot, meanwhile, is another company building tools to source B2B sales leads and better target teams' sales efforts. In a sea of other companies building sales intelligence tech, it claims to be the most GDPR-compliant of them on the market today.

The all-equity funding is coming from a single backer, Great Hill Partners, which is investing some primary and some secondary (buying out some shares from existing investors). It's also potentially offering a further €50 million ($52.7 million) to make acquisitions, since the trend that brought these two together is likely to continue.

"There is so much opportunity in consolidating the market and bringing together other pieces of the puzzle," Echobot CEO and founder Bastian Karweg told TechCrunch. He will become CEO of the combined company, with Leadfeeder CEO/founder Pekka Koskinen taking on a product role.

Initially the two companies will continue to be run separately with independent brands, but they expect to merge more of their operations and tech together. They are already doing some talent acquisition and finance functions together but software and sales integrations -- building out that bigger vision of a platform instead of selling point solutions -- is more complex and will take more time. They will potentially also take on a new name by next year, although one point to consider on the branding front is that Echobot is also the name of a Mirai malware variant...