The first Indian startup acquisition to take place after Whatsapp acquisition, Twitter acquired a Bengaluru based startup company – Zip-Dial to facilitate its process of reaching out to people who come online in such websites for the very first time. Since Twitter believes that despite the availability of various media, people in countries like Brazil and India fail to stay connected to these media due to the not-so-affordable data charges. Zip-Dial, a platform that initiates missed calls from the user’s side and allows giant global companies like Coca-Cola to connect to these users, who are deprived of direct internet access.
According to Twitter, the company decided to acquire the India-based startup company due to the uniqueness of the platform and because it opens up an entire database of customers across the world to connect to Global companies. The announcement of the acquisition was made by Twitter via a tweet on 20th January 2015. The giant reportedly shed a whopping $34-35 million (Rs 215 crore) for the acquisition. Despite the acquisition, the existing employees of Zip-Dial will reportedly be posted in India.
Zip-Dial is the first of its kind platform, which was co-founded by an American entrepreneur Valerie Wagoner in 2010. The company was founded by Valerie Wagoner in association with angel investors – Amiya Pathak and Sanjay Swami. The platform boasts of its user database of approximately 60 million, thus allowing these companies to tweak a user database of 22 million alone in India. According to Twitter, although the company will not disclose the user numbers according to their geographic location, it will reportedly access over 22 million user numbers in India, other than users who are located across other countries like Malaysia and Brazil.
This acquisition has really led to a spur in the Indian technology market and has initiated a wave of encouragement among the Indian startup companies and entrepreneurs. Although global acquisition of Indian startup companies is still counting to as low as ten, this acquisition has really moved the focus of the global entrepreneurs towards the Indian technology market. This has the tech news websites excited about what more is in store for the Indian technology market. The Chief Executive of Zip-Dial, Valerie Wagoner exclaimed “We are thrilled to expand our impact to a global level with Twitter.” Apart from Wagoner, the acquisition was also really encouraged by one of the company’s early investors Swamy, who said “This is a very good exit and a meaningful outcome for all investors. I hope it created several millionaires in the firm.”
