This mobile focus is not really a surprise when one considers that Quip co-founder and CEO Bret Taylor helped to create Google Maps, founded the social networking site FriendFeed (which was acquired by Facebook in 2009), and served as Facebook’s CTO during its aggressive mobile expansion phase. Quip has already sold its platform into several key companies, including Facebook.
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It will pay about $582 million in stock for the purchase, according to a Salesforce SEC filing, though TechCrunch put the purchase price at $750 million. Quip was founded in 2012 and had raised a total of $45 million in funding, with investors that include Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, Salesforce Ventures, Peter Fenton and Benchmark, Greylock and Yuri Milner.
That adds to Salesforce’s new buying spree in order to extend its cloud-based apps and services to its customers reaching beyond basic CRM. But it’s an interesting turn in the ongoing consolidation that we’ve seen in the enterprise market, and how that is transforming the bigger companies that are doing the buying.
In a blog post authored by Bret Taylor and Kevin Gibbs, two former Google engineers and the co-founders of Quip, the company expects that it will more quickly expand its service as a part of Salesforce. “The possibilities of mixing data, content and communication are awesome”, Quip writes in a blogpost. Mobile-First Productivity AppQuip, which integrates directly with the popular Slack, is a mobile-first word-processing and spreadsheet app that brings new competition to Microsoft Office 365 and OpenOffice.
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Quip is a productivity software suite that will be used by Salesforce to expand its offering in word processing and collaborative communications.
