Some interesting news for lovers of open, decentralized communications tech: Element, the company behind the eponymous Matrix -based Slack competitor (formerly known as Riot) has acquired developer-focused chat platform, Gitter, from dev services giant GitLab, which picked it up back in 2017. The acquisition means Gitter’s community of some 1.7M users will be migrating to…
Airship is announcing that it has acquired mobile commerce startup ReplyBuy. The startup (which was a finalist at TechCrunch’s 1st and Future competition in 2016) works with customers like entertainment venues and professional and college sports teams to send messages and sell tickets to fans via SMS. It raised $4 million in funding from Sand…
Pure Storage, the public enterprise data storage company, today announced that it has acquired Portworx, a well-funded startup that provides a cloud-native storage and data-management platform based on Kubernetes, for $370 million in cash. This marks Pure Storage’s largest acquisition to date and shows how important this market for multi-cloud data services has become. Current…
Another big M&A play is going down in the the world of media. Publishing group Red Ventures today announced that it is buying CNET Media Group from ViacomCBS for $500 million. The deal will include the eponymous CNET tech site, as well as ZDNet, Gamespot, TVGuide, Metacritic, and Chowhound. The news puts paid to speculation that had been…
SugarCRM announced this morning it has acquired customer intelligence startup, Node. The companies did not reveal the purchase price, but the deal has closed. While Sugar gains a ton of AI expertise, it also adds a customer prediction element to the platform such as figuring out the customers most likely to convert or most likely…
Consolidation continues apace in the world of e-commerce, and today it was the turn of the classified ads market. Today, eBay announced that it had reached a deal to sell off its Classifieds business unit to Adevinta, a Norway-based classified ads publisher majority owned by Norwegian publisher Schibsted. The deal is valued at $9.2 billion,…
Matt Saincome knows that compared to many of the startup acquisitions that we write about on TechCrunch, selling a website for a little over $1 million (mostly cash, with a little stock) isn’t a huge deal. “But in the world of punk comedy media? Whoo boy!” he said. Saincome is happy to poke fun at…
Facebook has been on a game studio acquisition spree over the past year, buying up developers behind some of the most popular VR titles. That trend continued today with the company’s acquisition of Ready at Dawn Studios, the developer behind the Lone Echo games, one of Oculus’s most successful series. The studio has been working…
VMware is acquiring network security firm Lastline, TechCrunch has learned. Since its launch in 2012, Lastline raised about $52.2 million, according to Crunchbase. Investors include Thomvest Ventures, which led the company’s $28.5 million Series C round in 2017; Redpoint and e.ventures, which led the company’s 2013 funding round; and Barracuda Networks, NTT Finance and Dell…
DHL has acquired a minority stake in Link Commerce, a turn-key e-commerce company that grew out of MallforAfrica.com — a Nigerian digital-retail startup. Link Commerce offers a white-label solution for doing digital-sales in emerging markets. Retailers can plug into the company’s e-commerce platform to create a web-based storefront that manages payments and logistics. With the…
