Yahoo Continues Startup Shopping Spree
In the last two plus years with Marissa Mayer at the masthead, Yahoo has bought more than 38 startups, 31 of whom have been shut down. Their latest acquisition, Bookpad, will be no different. Bookpad is the creator of Docspad, and is Yahoo’s first India based acquisition. Bookpad’s eight person team will be moving to Silicon Valley to join the team behind Yahoo Mail.
A representative at Yahoo is reported as stating “We have acquired Bookpad, the company behind the Docspad product. The team will join our communications organization in Bangalore, where they will work on strengthening the Yahoo Mail experience. We’re excited for the expertise and knowledge that the team brings with them, and can’t wait to get to work collaborating with them.”
Docspad, is a service that is designed for developers that wish to add editing features to their apps such as, document viewing, annotations and other editing features. The startup is only a year old, and was founded by three Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) graduates, Aditya Bandi, Niketh Sabbineni, and Ashwik Reddy. Though there are conflicting reports of just how much the company was acquired for, it is reported as being somewhere in the range of $8-15 Million.
In the company blog, CEO and co-founder Aditya Bandi states, “We built Docspad for a singular purpose: any app out there that deals with documents should be able to let the users open, edit and collaborate on those documents, from right inside the app. With Docspad, we’re helping to build a web where no one needs to download any document.”
Srivatsa Krishna, the secretary to the government deptartment.of information technology, biotechnology and science & technology, within the government of Karnataka is reported as saying “Getting acquired by Yahoo puts Bangalore on the global startup map…We will do everything it takes to match Silicon Valley and become the world’s favourite startup hub.”
This past year has been quite an exciting one for the Indian startup scene with some notable acquisitions, including: Google buying Impermium for an undisclosed amount, Facebook’s acquiring Little Eye Labs for $10-15 Million, and most recently business intelligence provider, Nielsen’s acquisition of Indicus Analytics also for an for an undisclosed amount.
