After losing LinkedIn, Salesforce to buy Quip for $582 mn

US customer relationship management and cloud computing company Salesforce.com Inc yesterday struck a deal to buy document-editing startup Quip for about $582 million.
In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Salesforce, which had earlier invested in Quip through its investment arm Salesforce Ventures, said that post closing, Quip will be its wholly owned subsidiary.

Quip, the cloud-based word processing app, was co-founded in 2012 by Bret Taylor, formerly chief technology officer of Facebook and Kevin Gibbs, who led engineering and product at Google. Taylor was last month appointed to Twitter's board.

Quip is a collaborative productivity software suite providing word processing and spreadsheet functionality used on mobile devices and the Web via iOS app, and Android app.

It allows groups of people to create and edit documents and spreadsheets as a group, typically for business purposes.

Quip had raised $45 million in funding, with investors like Marc Benioff, Salesforce Ventures, Peter Fenton and Benchmark, Greylock, and Yuri Milner.

Quip's products compete with Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service and Alphabet's Google Docs as well as apps from other smaller companies.

In a blog post, Quip said, ''As part of Salesforce, we will be able to expand our service more quickly and reach millions of people all over the world - which has been our mission since day one. And, we'll be able to extend the Salesforce Customer Success Platform in powerful new ways with our next-generation productivity capabilities. The possibilities of mixing data, content and communication are amazing.''

The acquisition will help Salesforce better compete with Microsoft in the cloud computing and CRM areas.

Recently, Salesforce joined the bidding war for LinkedIn, which Microsoft walked won with a $26 billion offer. (See: Microsoft to acquire LinkedIn for $26.2 bn in cash)