Dropbox Acquires Mobile Coupon Startup Endorse A Month After Shutdown

About a month after it shut down its app, mobile coupon startup Endorse has been acquired by Dropbox, the team announced on its blog today. The deal follows a number of other recent acquisitions Dropbox has been making, as it looks to add headcount in an increasingly constrained talent market.

Endorse had raised $4.25 million from Accel and SV Angel in 2010, and launched a web version of the product before moving to mobile with the launch of an iPhone app last August. The mobile coupon service was shut down a month ago, with Endorse announcing on its blog that users would have until the end of June to transfer cash that they’d accrued to their bank accounts.

Importantly, we’ve heard that this was an acquisition and not an acqui-hire of the company’s talent, although terms haven’t been disclosed and no one’s really budging on price. (If we can find out more, of course, we’ll update this post.) Last we heard, Endorse had about a dozen employees, the majority of whom will be joining the Dropbox team in the acquisition.

That includes Steve Carpenter, who founded the company as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel after selling Cake Financial to Etrade in 2010. Other notable members of the Endorse team include CTO Erik Klein, who had held engineering roles at SofaLabs and YouTube; Jiten Vaidya, lead engineer and former SRS/DBA manager at YouTube; and Franck Chastagnol, former lead engineer for YouTube ads.

Dropbox has been on a bit of a hiring and acquisition spree over the last year, as it purchased photo storage startup Snapjoy, as well as email management company Mailbox. It’s also made a number of significant hires, including Instagram Designer Tim Van Damme, Google’s Guido Van Rossum, and veteran Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo.