Microsoft to buy social network business software firm Yammer for $1-bn: report
15 Jun 2012
Microsoft Corp is buying four year-old startup social network business software company Yammer Inc for more than $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported, citing a person familiar with the matter.
San Francisco-based Yammer was founded in 2008 by David Sacks, the former COO at PayPal Inc, who originally launched it as an enterprise microblogging service but has now evolved as a full-fledged enterprise social network.
Yammer builds internal social networks for businesses, which allows employees to set up profiles, do microblogging, participate in discussion forums and receive activity stream notifications about what their colleagues are doing.
Yammer and Facebook share the same first investor, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, and is backed by Social+Capital Partnership – a fund established by former Facebook vice president Chamath Palihapitiya.
Yammer has raised more than $140 million in funding from venture firms, including Charles River Ventures and Emergence Capital Partners.
It is used by more than 200,000 companies worldwide and counts more than 80 per cent of Fortune 500 companies, including Deloitte, Ford, Nationwide, 7-Eleven, Orbitz Worldwide, Rakuten, and Telefonica O2, as its clients.