Dropbox Continues Aggressive Acquisition Campaign
In an interesting move over this past weekend, Dropbox has announced yet another acquisition – this time of mobile startup Endorse (which had abruptly announced its closing one month ago). Established in 2010, Endorse raised well over $4 million from Accel Partners and SV Angel. This mobile application offered consumers the ability to get up to 100% cash back on numerous brands without having to use print coupons. Financial specifics of the deal weren’t publicly released.
According to Techcrunch.com, the move was solely an acquisition of the company itself and not a fire-purchase of additional employee talent. However, a Dropbox spokesperson did comment that, “Dropbox has acquired Endorse, and we’re excited to have their top-notch talent join the Dropbox team.” This statement has the internet world buzzing that the acquisition was in fact for the benefit of Dropbox worker talent and not necessarily for the application itself.
To further add suspicion to this theory, Endorse CEO Steven Carpenter vaguely noted on the Endorse blog: “Just as important as what we’ve been working on, we’ve been similarly passionate about the how – and we purposefully built a team and company culture that values intellectual curiosity, risk-taking, teamwork, and customer service. We have known and long-admired the Dropbox team for years. Dropbox has that rare combination of talent, teamwork, and vision. We are joining an incredible team with ambitious goals and lots of difficult and exciting technical and business challenges ahead, and we could not be more pleased to have the opportunity be a part of the journey.”
Furthermore, there were countless other applications and startups who offered the same (or a similar) product. However, Endorse is comprised of some very talented individuals with exceptional résumés including the above mentioned CEO Steven Carpenter who sold web-based financial service site Cake Financial to E-Trade, Chief Technology Officer Erik Klein and Lead Engineers Franck Chastagnol and Jiten Vaidya.
No word has been released on whether or not Dropbox plans to continue running the Endorse app.
