Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has acquired Indian startup Little Eye Labs to help strengthen its mobile strategy. It’s the first acquisition of an Indian company by the social networking giant. The Bangalore-based startup confirmed the deal on its official website. Little Eye Labs make a tool to analyze the performance of apps. The software helps Android app developers analyze, measure and monitor their apps. They can estimate the app’s usage, network data consumption and memory, and visualize its behavior.
Little Eye to help Facebook improve its mobile business
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has been pushing aggressively in mobile. But the company has lagged behind other social media firms such as Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) despite 874 million of its users accessing the site through mobile devices. Subbu Subramanian, an engineering manager at Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), said that Little Eye labs has world-class technology to help app developers improve their Android products. The social networking giant is looking forward to work with some of the tech industry’s most talented engineers, he added.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is laser-focused on making useful apps. The Indian startup will help the company improve its Android codebase to develop high-performing apps. The Little Eye Labs team will be moving to Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) headquarters. The companies didn’t reveal financial terms of the deal, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) paid $10-$15 million to buy the startup.
Facebook on an acquisition spree
The Menlo Park-based company has made many other acquisitions over the past few months. It purchased the cloud service company Parse in April, 2013. Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) also bought some of the assets of Monoidics to improve its mobile development process. Mark Zuckerberg had also made an offer to buy Snapchat, a rapidly growing mobile messaging app, for $3 billion. But Snapchat rejected the offer.
Little Eye Labs is just an 18-month startup, founded in May 2012 by four engineers Lakshman Kakkirala, Kumar Rangarajan, Giridhar Murthy and Satyam Kandula. It had received seed capital from VenturEast Tenet Fund and GSF Superangels.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) shares skidded 0.22% to $57.79 in pre-market trading Wednesday.