LinkedIn has officially announced that it has acquired Pulse, a newsreader and mobile content distribution platform, for $90 million in cash and stock.
The $90 million deal, expected to close in the second quarter, is a combination of 90 percent of company stock and 10 percent cash. When the deal closes employees of Pulse will join the LinkedIn team at its headquarters in Mountain View, California.
It's estimated that over 30 million people in more than 190 countries use the news aggregator's e-reader applications on various devices running Apple and Android-based operating systems. It should be noted that over 40 percent of its users are from outside the U.S.
Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta (both from India) while they were students at Stanford University. The service was initially an iPad-only app which was later expanded onto other platforms.
Deep Nishar, LinkedIn's SVP of products and user experiences, called Pulse "the perfect complement" to LinkedIn. Nishar, writing on LinkedIn's blog post, recalled his first meeting with one of Pulse's two co-founders, Ankit Gupta, at a technology innovation competition in India years ago. "Imagine my surprise a few years later when reading about two Stanford graduates who were shaking up the app world with a fresh, new way to consume news on mobile - and to find Ankit and his co-founder Akshay Kothari at the center of it. So, it's both personally and professionally exciting to welcome both Ankit and Akshay, as well as the talented Pulse team to LinkedIn today. They bring a unique combination of product, technology, and design expertise to our existing team," Nishar writes.
It's not quite clear at this point in time as to how LinkedIn and Pulse will integrate; however, Pulse confirms that its apps will remain unaltered for now. "We're still working together on the product you love, and will continue to provide an innovative and visual news reading experience," Pulse Team writes on the company blog. "For now, the Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings."
