The rumours were right, after all, and it’s now official. India-based
startup Little Eye Labs has been acquired by Facebook. The year old company
will now be shifting bases – along with its entire team – to Facebook’s
headquarters in Menlo Park, California.
The company announced its acquisition in a blog post yesterday. Little Eye Labs pointed at the fact that this happens
to be social networking giant’s first Indian acquisition in over 10 years of
its existence.
Little Eye Labs was
founded a year ago by a bunch of programme analysis fans, 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. 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.
The company has
announced that even as it makes the transition to Facebook, it wishes to treat
its existing customers well and will be offering information on a free version
of Little Eye until June 30 this year.
As previously reported, the deal was being struck as part of the
M&A connect programme by iSpirt, the organisation that broke out of
Nasscom. The firm had launched the programme’s hot-line for product companies
to help them be acquired or raise funds. The talks were reportedly conducted in
Palo Alto, US, back in May. Besides Facebook, IBM, Cisco and VMware
participated too. The social network, however, emerged the winner here and
while the terms are not being disclosed yet, TechCrunch is still sticking to its
estimate of$10 million to $15 million being the amount paid for Little Eye Labs.
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