Wednesday, 8 January 2014

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Facebook acquires Bangalore-based startup Little Eye Labs




BANGALORE: 
Facebook has acquired Bangalore-based startup Little Eye Labs making it the social networking giant's first acquisition in India. Little Eye is a tool that helps Android app developers to measure, analyze and optimize their apps.

It helps visualize the app's behaviour and estimates the app's power, memory and network data consumption trends. The entire LittleEye Labs team will move to Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where they would leverage the social networking giant's infrastructure to improve the performance of their apps. "Little Eye Labs will join forces with Facebook to take its mobile development to the next level! This is Facebook's first acquisition of an Indian company, and we are happy to become part of such an incredibleteam," the company said in a note on their website.

The Bangalore-based startup was founded in May last year by four programme analysis geeks -- Giridhar Murthy, who worked at Apple earlier, Kumar Rangarajan, who has worked at IBM and HP, Satyam Kandula, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus and ex IBMer Lakshman Kakkirala.
This has been a fun and exciting journey. We're eager to be working alongside the incredible team at Facebook and together, we'll continue on our mission of building awesome analysis tools to aide in the development of brilliant apps," said Rangarajan, the CEO of Little Eye. The company has raised seed funding from from GSF Superangels and Venture East Fund. Rajesh Sawhney, founder of GSF Accelerator, added, "Acquisition of Little Eye Labs by Facebook is a transformative deal for not only the Indian startup ecosystem but also for the whole of the emerging world. This validates GSF's core tenet that Indian product startups are now ready for a global play."

Subbu Subramanian, engineering manager in Facebook said, "I'm excited to announce that we're acquiring Little Eye Labs.This is an opportunity to welcome some of the industry's most- talented engineers to our team in Menlo Park, California. At Facebook, we remain focused on producing useful and engaging mobile apps. The Little Eye Labs technology will help us to continue improving our Android codebase to make more efficient, higher-performing apps."

WASHINGTON: Facebook is reportedly set to acquire an Indian startup Little Eye Labs in a deal valued between $10 million and $15 million.

Bangalore-based Little Eye Labs's chief product is a tool that helps Android app developers to measure, analyze and optimize their apps. It helps visualize the app's behaviour and estimates the app's power, memory and network data consumption trends.

According to TechCrunch, Facebook's acquisition of the Indian startup would mean a lot for the one-and-a-half years old company, which also pitched to Twitter but the social networking giant offered a better deal.

The final deal is expected to be signed by mid-January following which most of the Little Eye Labs's founding team will move to Facebook's US headquarters, and work there as part of the mobile engineering team, the report added.

Twitter is also said to be in talks for its first acquisition of an India-based startup, Frrole. It is a Big Data startup that analyses tweets by Twitter users to generate insights for media, consumer and entertainment verticals.

Based in Bangalore, this company is described as a social newspaper that gets its data from Twitter. It sifts through over 10 million tweets per day and divides them into categories. The company covers data from 55 cities in six countries to aggregate content.