Twitter Acquires Palo Alto-Based Scalable Computing Startup Ubalo

It’s only been a few weeks since the folks behind music-charting app We Are Hunted confirmed that it was acquired by Twitter, and it seems that Twitter isn’t done snapping up startups just yet. Ubalo CEO Jacob Mattingly and CTO Ian Downes announced earlier today via blog post that the folks at Twitter have agreed to acquire the scalable computing technology they’ve been working on for the past two years, and that the four-person Ubalo team would officially join the Twitter flock.

I can’t blame you if you haven’t heard of Ubalo — it first launched back in 2011 (complete with funding from Harrison Metal Capital) and seemed to hide behind a very vague landing page that claimed that Ubalo was an “early-stage numerical computing startup.” That vision seemed to change somewhat over time, as the team was most recently working on a simplified way for users to run their code across large computing environments. As the team put it, the mission was to “hide the details of the computers, environments, and messaging, so our users can worry much less about integration and scaling and instead write just the code they need for their analysis or processing.”

The Ubalo team is no stranger to fiddling with Twitter’s data either — one of their case studies dealt with collecting tweets and clustering them based on their topics. The amount of time needed to complete the task? Just over 21 seconds. Yet another case study saw the team processing 25,000 tweets and analyzing them for sentiment, which took roughly 19 seconds.

As you might guess, Twitter has declined to officially comment on the deal or where the Ubalo team would end up, but the team pointed to one particular meeting that set this whole thing into motion.

When we met the infrastructure folks at Twitter, we realized that it’s a company with brilliant people, strong momentum, exciting challenges and a promising future. We quickly became enthusiastic about the possibility of collaborating with them and the impact we could have there.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see that Mattingley and Downes have joined Twitter’s engineering team to help refine the incredibly popular service’s infrastructure, but for now we’ll have to wait and see — neither founder would shed any additional light on the deal.