Last month, we reported that Facebook was planning to buy Little Eye Labs, an Indian startup that makes a software tool for analyzing the performance of Android apps. Now the Bangalore-based company has confirmed its acquisition by the social media giant. A direct source told us that the deal is in the range of $10 million to $15 million. Little Eye Labs’ investors have included VenturEast and GSF.
“With this acquisition, Little Eye Labs will join forces with Facebook to take its mobile development to the next level! This is Facebook’s first acquisition of an Indian company, and we are happy to become part of such an incredible team,” the company said in a statement on its site.
As expected, the entire Little Eye Labs team will move to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where it will build analysis tools to help develop apps.
“From there, we’ll be able to leverage Facebook’s world-class infrastructure and help improve performance of their already awesome apps. For us, this is an opportunity to make an impact on the more than 1 billion people who use Facebook,” they added.
TechCrunch’s Pankaj Mishra wrote last month that the acquisition of Little Eye Labs fits into Facebook’s mobile strategy, which has lagged behind rivals like Twitter even though 874 million of its 1.19 billion users (as of September 2013) access the social network primarily via their mobile devices.
Other acquisitions Facebook has made to strengthen its mobile products include Parse, a mobile-backend-as-a-service startup it bought in April 2013.
As Pankaj also noted, the acquisition of an Indian startup that is less than 18 months old is a significant boost for India’s startup ecosystem, where high-profile acquisitions are rare. We learned that Little Eye Labs also pitched to Twitter, but was offered a better deal by Facebook.
“The acquisition of Little Eye Labs by Facebook is transformative deal for not only Indian startup ecosystem but also for the whole of the emerging world. This validates GSF’s core tenet that Indian product startups are now ready for a global play,” Rajesh Sawhney of GSF’s accelerator program, which Little Eye Labs graduated from, told TechCrunch.
The company also said that current customers of Little Eye for Android, which helps developers measure, analyze and optimize their app’s performance, will “receive further information on plans to offer a free version of Little Eye until June 30, 2014” and more information can be found on its downloads page.
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