Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) made its first acquisition under Marissa Mayer, and it’s a mobile review app led by a former Google colleague. Robby Stein, one of Stamped’s founders, worked at Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) as an associate product manager, a sort of executive grooming program for especially promising young employees that was led by Mayer.
New York-based Stamped, allows users to share recommendations of restaurants, books, and other things with friends. According to the reports, Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) acquired the startup for its talent, and the company’s nine employees will now be part of a new mobile team in New York. The financial terms of the deal were not reported.
The acquisition is in line with Mayer’s strategy of using acqui-hires to recruit talent and pushing Yahoo into mobile. The deal is expected to be in the double digit millions and will give a healthy return to the high-profile investors, including Ellen DeGeneres and Ryan Seacrest, who pitched a total of $3 million into the company.
The acquisition of Stamped will certainly be not the last deal made by Yahoo, the company is on a major acquisition hunt for small startups with mobile expertise. Earlier this week, Mayer revealed her intentions of making mobile was a big priority for her at the moment, saying “Our top priority is a focused, coherent mobile strategy… at some point [in the near future] we’ll have to be a predominantly mobile company”.
Here’s what Stamped’s founders said in their blog post about the deal:
“We couldn’t be more thrilled to join Yahoo!. As a team of mostly former Googlers, we’ve all worked with and are big fans of Marissa. So, when an opportunity arose to become a part of the team at Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), we jumped. As entrepreneurs, it’s never easy to walk away from something you built from the ground up, but the folks we met with at Yahoo! are simply top-notch and we’re thrilled to be joining them!
The Stamped team will be creating a brand new product and engineering office for Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) in NYC’s Bryant Park. After everything we learned from building Stamped, we’re excited to start work again on something big, mobile, and new — but we can’t discuss the details just yet. And we’re really stoked to be able to hire lots of talented engineers and designers for this new project. If you’re interested in joining us, send us an email.”
The Stamped team has already started an aggressive hiring effort to staff up the NYC mobile office. Stamped’s iPhone and web app will both be discontinued by the end of the year.
