Kimono Labs, a Y Combinator-backed web-scraping tool that helps developers grab information from sites without having to write their own scrapers, has been acquired by Palantir.
The company made the announcement on its website today, and Kimono co-founder Pratap Ranade confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch. Neither Palantir nor Kimono disclosed any financial details of the transaction, but Kimono previously raised about $5 million in 2014.
Kimono Labs says it currently has 125,000 developers on its platform (though it’s unclear if these are active users or simply total sign-ups). They will only have two weeks to migrate to a different service because the team will shut down the Kimono service on February 29, 2016.
“Because of our new roles at Palantir, it will not be possible for us to continue providing the publicly available cloud hosted kimono product,” the team explains. I asked Ranade for more details about why the team decided on shutting the service down on such a short notice, but he declined to comment (“We care deeply about our users, but unfortunately I’m not at liberty to discuss the details.”)
Kimono will still offer users access to a free desktop version of the service for OS X and Windows, though. The company says that this pretty much offers the same functionality as the hosted version and that it will integrate the desktop app with Firebase to offer cloud-hosted API endpoints. Users of the desktop version have until March 31 to import their APIs from the service’s hosted service.
With Scrapy, Feedity and others, there are already a couple of alternative frameworks and services on the market. Palantir often shuts down the companies it acquires, so today’s move doesn’t come as a surprise, but this is obviously not an ideal situation for developers who integrated Kimono’s services into their applications.