Yahoo acquires US-based start-up with operations in Bangalore
22 Sep 2014
Yahoo Inc has acquired, a US-based start-up with operations in Bangalore for over $8 million, according to news reports today. The value of the deal worked out in excess of $8 million. However, according to The Economic Times, Yahoo and BookPad were yet to confirm the deal and the money involved.
Post acquisition of the technology the team would be relocating to the Silicon Valley, the report said, adding the ''deal size is much above $8 million.''
''This is Yahoo's first technology M&A deal for an Indian company and it's good news for the BookPad team. The company has built some very interesting technology and was beginning to demonstrate some solid customer traction. They were extremely capital efficient and focused on solving a real pain point,'' Ravi Gururaj, chair, product council and member, executive council with software lobby body Nasscom, said in an email response.
The company, incubated at the Startup Warehouse of Nasscom, also formed part of the fourth batch of the Microsoft Accelerator programme. BookPad, which allows users to view documents (pdf, word, powerpoint) online, was founded in 2013 by Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati alumni Aditya Bandi, Niketh Sabbineni and Ashwik Battu with their own funds.
According to the profiles of the three founders on a business-oriented social networking site, they were now employees of Yahoo.
Docspad supports Word, Powerpoint, Excel, PDF, ODT, ODP, ODX and ePub 2.0, as well as most common image formats, ZD Net reported.
In the company blog, co-founder and CEO Bandi said: "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."
Talks reportedly got underway in May last year when Sabbineni met Yahoo executives in the US. Under the terms of the agreement, the staff of the company would move to Silicon Valley, sources familiar with the matter said.
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