After raising nearly $20 million and becoming one of the most downloaded mobile apps but never finding real revenue, Bump Technologies has been acquired by Google. Its namesake app Bump lets you physically tap phones together to share contact information and more, and it will continue to run and be available for download.
Bump’s David Lieb writes “We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms. So we couldn't be more thrilled to join Google.” It appears that the whole 25-person team including Lieb and fellow co-founder Andy Huibers will be coming aboard at the search giant.
Bump and the collaborative photo sharing app called Flock it released last year “will continue to work as they always have for now; stay tuned for future updates.” The blog post doesn’t mention what will happen to the Bump Pay app the startup built on top of PayPal.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, so it’s hard to tell exactly how strong of an exit this was for Bump and its investors, which include Y Combinator, Sequoia Captial, Felicis Ventures, SV Angel, Andreessen Horowitz, and many angels.
Bump gained huge popularity by being an early App Store hit. Instead of having to clumsily type out a new friend or professional colleague’s contact information, you and someone else could both open Bump, bump fists together while holding your phones, and the contact info, photos, audio, video, or other selected files would be shared between you instantly. As of March it had hit 125 million downloads on iOS and 1 billion photos shared.
With time, though, other ways to quickly share contact information emerged. Meanwhile, Bump remained free so it wasn’t earning any revenue so paying its strong mobile engineering team the company may have burned through the $16.5 million round led by Andreessen that it raised in November 2011.
Then Apple dropped a bomb on Bump. It announced a new feature called AirDrop for iOS 7 that would make sharing files between nearby phone a native feature. Despite steady growth (the app had 100 million iOS downloads in December 2012), it was time for Bump to call it a day.
Based on these factors, the acquisition may have been more lucrative than a basic acquihire, but not big enough to be considered a home run.
What may have interested Google actually isn’t Bump itself, but Flock. The app uses geolocation to determine which of your Facebook friends your nearby, and then offers to let you create a collaborative photo album with them that includes all the shots any of you took at that party, concert, or day in the park.
Google might look to turn Flock into a part of Google+ as a way to simultaneously compete with Facebook’s photo sharing and Dropbox’s photo saving services. Google+’s Party Mode was a pioneer in collaborative photo sharing, but the late-comer social network has still failed to gain serious engagement. Facebook recently launched shared albums, making it more dire for Google to get deeper into the space.
With Bump and Flock’s features combined with Google’s built in-audience, the ideals of “irreducible” design that Bump Technologies embodied could make a bigger impact without having to generate revenue directly.
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