Google confirms Waze acquisition

Google has announced that it has acquired Waze, the Israeli-based crowd-sourced navigation app, as everyone expected it would today.

“…we’re excited to announce we’ve closed the acquisition of Waze. This fast-growing community of traffic-obsessed drivers is working together to find the best routes from home to work, every day,” the company said in a blogpost.

Rumours have been flying about for the last couple of months that various tech giants were bidding for company but it seems Google has won out with a rumoured US$1.3-billion offer, a significant amount for the Israeli-based startup.

Waze has almost 50-million users of which 32% are active. The company has 80-employees and two offices, one in Israel and one in Silicon Valley. Waze is available for download and use anywhere in the world, but while some countries have a full basemap, other countries still require users to record the roads and edit the maps — making it a truly crowdsourced platform.

The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.

We’ll also work closely with the vibrant Waze community, who are the DNA of this app, to ensure they have what’s needed to grow and prosper.

The Waze community and its dedicated team have created a great source of timely road corrections and updates. We welcome them to Google and look forward to working with them in our ongoing effort to make a comprehensive, accurate and useful map of the world.