Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) has acquired Hacker League, a popular platform for managing hackathons, which will be incorporated with the APImanagement company Mashery (acquired April 2013). There is no information yet on how much the chipmaker has paid for the acquisition, but it is expected to be something below $180 million, which is what Intel paid for Mashery, says a report from Techcrunch.
How Hacker League will help Intel
Oren Michels, founder of Mashery said that the acquisition was done with the purpose of enhancing the developer work it is already doing on a daily basis.
“We acquired the assets of Hacker League to take a product that makes hackathons great so that we could do more things to support developers,” he said.
Intel can use Hacker league in its own hardware-focused hackathons. Apart from that Hacker League can be used to enhance Mashery, helping them work on their own internal development.
With Hacker League, Mashery can increase the number of events for developers. At present, Mashery is actively involved in around 80 hackathons annually while Hacker League has sponsored around 460 events worldwide since October 2011, with a database of around 6000 hacks from those events.
Hacker League a side project for co-founders
As per the terms of the deal, Intel will acquire only the platform, IP and other assets while the three co-founders Mike Swift, Abe Stanway, and Ian Jennings are not a part of the deal.
Swift told Techcrunch that Hacker league holds lots of respect for Mashery. He added that it was the best possible route for Hacker League, and the company is excited with this new development.
Swift is the co-founder of Hacker League along with Stanway and Jennings. All three are students of Rutgers University. They said that Hacker league has been a side project for them, and they have achieved more than they expected from Hackathons. All three are employed with companies like SendGrid, Etsy and PubNub. After selling Hacker League, all three would continue with their other projects. The three co-founders also participated in the HackNY program, which organizes university student Hackathons.
On the other hand, Mashery is a full-fledged business, and has an existing business that targets developers. Mashery holds a lot of potential that can be unlocked by Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC). It will be worth seeing how Intel uses Hacker League in the future.
