LinkedIn has officially bought the company behind new reading app Pulse for US$90-million, a month after reports emerged that a deal was set to go through.
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The professional social network has confirmed that it paid US$90-million for the news reader. The vast majority of that US$90-million (around 90%) comes in stock, while the rest is cash.
In an official blog post, LinkedIn’s senior vice president of products and user experience Deep Nishar, confirmed that the acquisition had been made to bolster LinkedIn’s publishing chops.
“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform — where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content,” he says, calling Pulse “a perfect complement to this vision”:
Pulse’s core value proposition is to help foster informed discussions that spark the decisions shaping the world around us through news and information. This shared view that the power of professional information and knowledge can transform lives and the world makes LinkedIn and Pulse a particularly great fit.
The Pulse founders meanwhile say that LinkedIn shares their belief “in the power of knowledge and elevated discussion, particularly for professionals looking for insights to help make them better at what they do”.
“News—the people, the places, the stories—is part of our daily conversation. Over the past three years, Pulse has established itself as a key part of that conversation; it has grown from a small project, to a platform for millions of readers to access their favorite content,” said Pulse founder Ashkay Kothari. Gupta added, “Now that our team is part of LinkedIn, we’ll work together to expand the possibilities for content discovery, helping readers engage in conversations with colleagues, mentors, industry leaders, and beyond.”
For the moment, it looks like there won’t be any changes to the Pulse apps although it does now offer a LinkedIn influencer feed with posts from the likes of Richard Branson and Jack Welch.
Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were students at Stanford University. IT currently has more than 30-million users who have activated its iOS and Android-based news reader apps in more than 190 countries. Pulse is available in nine languages, and approximately 40% of users are outside the United States.
