Indian Product startups are slowly coming of age – After Facebook acquired Little Eye Labs and Google acquired impermium, Yahoo has made their first Indian acquisition. They have bought Bangalore based startup company Bookpad, makers of Docspad, a HTML 5 document embedding, editing and annotations API provider for web and mobile apps. [Via]
The exact value of acquisition is not disclosed, however, ToI has put the figure, citing sources, in the region of $15 million (around Rs. 90 Crore). [Update: the deal is around $8.3M or roughly INR 50 Crore] This year old startup was founded by three IIT-Guwahati graduates Aditya Bandi, Niketh Sabbineni and Ashwik Battu. Post acquisition, all the six full-time Bookpad employees, including the three founders, will join Yahoo’s engineering team in Bangalore. The deal includes cash, earn outs and stock options.
Bookpad’s flagship product Docspad enables online and mobile users to view, edit and annotate any documents (PDF, Word, presentations etc) within any app. They have built and API that developers can integrate into their mobile-web apps and the users can then seamlessly carry out editing and annotations without the need of download. Currently Bookpad supports 15 different document formats.
The best part is, being on HTML 5, it works across devices and does not require downloading of plugins or any Desktop software. You can check out Aditya Bandi’s blog post on why the built Docspad.
You can check out product overview video below:
Docspad is a very focused product and can be useful to every web and mobile app out there that deals with documents. Yahoo has strategically bought the startups because they can now easily integrate the technology into all of their products.
Bookpad’s acquisition by Yahoo clearly shows that Indian product startup ecosystem is growing and global biggies are noticing startups coming out of India. India has always produced developed some great products, but they have been lacking sorely when it came to exposure at global level.
However, number of accelerators and incubators have sprung up in India over last couple of years and they are now slowly giving exposure to Indian startups at Global level. Bookpad is a classic case of that because the deal with Yahoo happened due to their participation in Nasscom’s Innotrek which included a trip to Silicon Valley that was designed to help Indian startups meet US technology giants.
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