Facebook Acquires An Indian Start-Up For The First Time

It seems social networking giants cannot keep their eyes off Indian innovators. Professional networking site LinkedIn has been acquiring Indian-origin companies for a couple of years now. And now social media leader Facebook has scooped up Bangalore-based tech start-up Little Eye Labs for an undisclosed amount. It is the first Indian company acquired by Facebook. But the takeover has not come as a surprise as media reports were rife about the proposed acquisition for over a month now. Although the financials have not been disclosed, a TechCrunch report earlier pegged it at $10-15 million.

So what does this Indian company do in the first place? Founded in 2012 by five tech professionals – Giridhar Murthy, Kumar Rangarajan (also the CEO of the company), Satyam Kandula, Lakshman Kakkirala and Aditya Kulkarni – Little Eye Labs develops performance analysis and monitoring tools for Android apps (2.3 or later versions). The company had released the first official version of the tool in April 2013. The tool not only provides critical insight into an app’s key performance (such as power usage, data usage, memory consumption, etc.), but also helps developers analyse those issues contextually – so that quick-fix and hassle-free solutions could be worked out.

Prior to starting up Little Eye Labs, Murthy worked with Apple; Rangarajan was at IBM and HP while Kakkirala worked with IBM and Yahoo.

The seven-member-strong Indian tech firm has confirmed the acquisition in a statement posted on the site and says that the entire team will now move to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California from where they can “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.”

The company has, however, assured its current customers that they won’t be left in the lurch and there will be further information on plans to offer a free version of Little Eye until June 30, 2014.

The start-up has already secured seed capital from GSF Superangels and also from VentureEast Tenet Fund. According to an earlier report by Business Standard, the firm raised an investment between $100,000 and $200,000 from GSF.

Interestingly, professional networking site LinkedIn is also getting aggressive about Indian-origin companies and acquired SlideShare in 2012 for $119 million. SlideShare is a presentation-sharing site founded by India-born Rashmi Sinha. Last year, too, LinkedIn acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for Web and mobile. The transaction was valued at $90 million in stock and cash. Interestingly, Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Stanford University. The service started out as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the Web. Just before the acquisition, it also started to dip its toes into social by adding a number of social features to its apps.

Although Facebook has acquired a purely tech company, let’s not forget that it is all about evaluating the performance of Android apps. So it may not be wrong to assume that FB is eyeing a more enhanced mobile experience at every level – a similar thing LinkedIn is trying to achieve through its Pulse app. This time, the writing is definitely on the wall – the future is going to be social and mobile.