Indian startups are surely piquing the interest of international technology giants, at the cost of home-grown technology companies. The most recent acquisition is of a Bangalore-based startup called ZipDial by social media site Twitter. This happens to be Twitter's first Indian acquisition. Let us look at five recent Indian startup acquisitions.
Twitter – ZipDial
Twitter announced that it has acquired ZipDial, a mobile marketing firm based out of Bangalore. Twitter plans to bolster its reach in emerging markets such as India. It also brings Twitter a new engineering office in Bangalore. ZipDial's platform has engaged nearly 60 million users, which includes the world's leading brands and media companies.
People across India use ZipDial's platform to access cricket scores, audio programming, tweets from their favorite Bollywood stars and so on, from their mobile phones. Popular personalities including actors, politicians and athletes, use the platform to instantly reach millions of citizens on Twitter through text and voice messages.
ZipDial's mobile platform lets people follow and engage with content across all interfaces. The platform offers a unique model of engaging users while 'offline'. This helps it personalise the experience and content in ways that are not possible on traditional online platforms. Read more about ZipDial here.
Yahoo – Bookpad
Yahoo acquired Bangalore-based startup called Bookpad, makers of an online file-editing service called Docspad. The company will be joining the Yahoo team in Bangalore, where they will be working on strengthening the Yahoo Mail experience. An Economic Times report speculated the deal to be pegged at Rs 50 crore. Bookpad is a little over a year old company launched by IIT-Guwahati graduates named Niketh Sabbineni, Aditya Bandi and Ashwik Reddy.
Bookpad's product, called Docspad, allows users to view, create and edit files from within their apps. Docspad supports all popular document formats and works on desktops as well as mobile devices. It runs on HTML 5, so it's also pretty nippy to use. You could think of it as a humble alternative to Google Docs that also allows integration with other business apps.
Facebook – Little Eye Labs
Bangalore-based Little Eye Labs was Facebook's first Indian acquisition which took place early last year. While official figures weren't out, but TechCrunch pegged the buying amount to be in the $10 million to $15 million range. Little Eye Labs's key product is a software tool for analysing the performance of Android apps. The aim of the exercise was to help with building better tools for mobile developers. It eventually found backing by GSF and VeturEast Tenet Fund. Android developers and testers can make use of the tools to measure and optimise their apps' performances.
Little Eye Labs was founded in 2013 by Giridhar Murthy, a former Apple employee; Kumar Rangarajan who has worked with IBM and HP; Satyam Kandula, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus and Lakshman Kakkirala, also a former IBM and Yahoo! employee.
Google – Impermium
Quick on the heels of the Facebook-Little Eye Labs' acquisition, news broke out that Google had also decided to do some startup shopping in India. It picked up a three-year old security startup with an India connect called Impermium. The startup is a security company that builds products for websites and has offices in Bangalore and California and dealt in the cyber security space. Its main function is controlling spam, eliminating fraud and web abuse online.
Besides CEO and co-founder Risher, two Indians have been instrumental in making Impermium – Vish Ramarao and Naveen Jamal. While Ramarao and Risher were based in California, Jamal took care of the company's needs in Bangalore. All three of them were reportedly colleagues in Yahoo when they decided to break out and found Impermium.
Gamse Show Network – BASH Gaming
BASH Gaming was a startup co-founded in 2008 by Sumit Gupta. It was acquired by US-based Game Show Network (GSN) last year for $165 million. GSN is a joint venture between DirecTV and Sony Picture Television which is into producing television game shows such as Wheel of Fortune. They are also into licensing their TV shows to casual mobile gaming companies.
BASH Gaming started out as a social casino gaming app on Facebook and eventually moved on to mobile platforms such as iOS, Android and on the Amazon app store. Bingo Bash, one of BASH Gaming's popular Bingo based game has round 40 million installations and over 4 million active users across the globe playing each other across devices. GSN plans to leverage the user base of BASH Gaming's multi-player technology to build their own skill-based gaming platforms for real prize money.
Facebook Little Eye Labs, Google Impermium, Indian startup acquisitions, Twitter Zipdial
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