Indian Startup Little Eye Labs Confirms Its Acquisition By Facebook, Deal Worth $10-$15M | TechCrunch
- ️@TechCrunch
- ️Wed Jan 08 2014
Last month, we reported that Facebook was planning to buy Little Eye Labs, an Indian startup that makes a software tool for analyzing the performance of Android apps. Now the Bangalore-based company has confirmed its acquisition by the social media giant. A direct source told us that the deal is in the range of $10 million to $15 million. Little Eye Labs’ investors have included VenturEast and GSF.
“With this acquisition, Little Eye Labs will join forces with Facebook to take its mobile development to the next level! This is Facebook’s first acquisition of an Indian company, and we are happy to become part of such an incredible team,” the company said in a statement on its site.
As expected, the entire Little Eye Labs team will move to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where it will build analysis tools to help develop apps.
“From there, we’ll be able to leverage Facebook’s world-class infrastructure and help improve performance of their already awesome apps. For us, this is an opportunity to make an impact on the more than 1 billion people who use Facebook,” they added.
TechCrunch’s Pankaj Mishra wrote last month that the acquisition of Little Eye Labs fits into Facebook’s mobile strategy, which has lagged behind rivals like Twitter even though 874 million of its 1.19 billion users (as of September 2013) access the social network primarily via their mobile devices.
Other acquisitions Facebook has made to strengthen its mobile products include Parse, a mobile-backend-as-a-service startup it bought in April 2013.
As Pankaj also noted, the acquisition of an Indian startup that is less than 18 months old is a significant boost for India’s startup ecosystem, where high-profile acquisitions are rare. We learned that Little Eye Labs also pitched to Twitter, but was offered a better deal by Facebook.
“The acquisition of Little Eye Labs by Facebook is transformative deal for not only Indian startup ecosystem but also for the whole of the emerging world. This validates GSF’s core tenet that Indian product startups are now ready for a global play,” Rajesh Sawhney of GSF’s accelerator program, which Little Eye Labs graduated from, told TechCrunch.
The company also said that current customers of Little Eye for Android, which helps developers measure, analyze and optimize their app’s performance, will “receive further information on plans to offer a free version of Little Eye until June 30, 2014” and more information can be found on its downloads page.
Catherine Shu covered startups in Asia and breaking news for TechCrunch. Her reporting has also appeared in the New York Times, the Taipei Times, Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal and the Village Voice. She studied at Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Disclosures: None
Pankaj Mishra has been a technology journalist and editor since the year 2000 with several publications including The Economic Times, Mint and TechCrunch. Based in Bengaluru, he writes about people and companies taking technology mainstream in India. Pankaj is the editor-in-chief and CEO of FactorDaily.
As co-founder, editor-in-chief and CEO, my responsibilities include having conversations with existing and potential investors of SourceCode Media Pvt. Ltd., the company that owns FactorDaily. These investors include Accel Partners for now. As the CEO, I also have an oversight of business strategy and branding functions, and I work directly with my colleagues dedicated for carrying out such activities. I consider it sacrosanct to keep “the wall” between pure journalism and sales, marketing functions intact. My writings for FactorDaily have complete editorial independence, and neither existing and potential investors, nor existing and potential advertisers or partners, have any influence on what I write. Everytime I write about companies where Accel or any of our investors have invested, I will make relevant disclosures. At FactorDaily, everytime we write about the companies or people who have any direct connection with our investors, we will provide a direct link to the ethics statement and code of conduct. I do not own any stocks in the companies I write about, and if at all I do in future, relevant disclosures will be made.