Facebook agreed a deal to acquire Snaptu, the company behind an app which made the social networking service available to feature phone users worldwide. On its corporate blog, Snaptu said that after developing the appliaction, “we soon decided that working as part of the Facebook team offered the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development.”
The acquisition is expected to complete “within a few weeks,” and during the transition “we expect Snaptu will continue to operate as it does today.” According to Israeli publication Globes, the deal is worth “US$60–US$70 million.”
In addition to its handset app, Snaptu provides back-end technology which “handles the provisioning and management of online content and services from our partners’ systems to the client residing on the end users’ mobile phones.” This is paired with the Java-based handset app “to offer users a single point of access to online content and services from multiple separate sources.”
Alongside Facebook, Snaptu supports a number of other social networking sites and content providers including ESPN. It was not revealed if the company will focus exclusively on Facebook under its new ownership. Snaptu previously said that its app is used by “over 30 million people worldwide.”
Snaptu was established in 2007, and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Carmel Ventures. The company is based in London, with offices in Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv.
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