Social network Tagged is continuing its acquisition tear, having made its fifth purchase of the past two years. This time, it’s acquiring location-based mobile discovery app Urbantag, and adding co-founders Andrew Hoag and Emma Van Niekerk to its team.
Urbantag produces a mobile app for discovering and sharing different local venues. The idea was to bookmark and curate real-world places, which created a type of social recommendations system for its users. Since being launched, Urbantag users have created more than 150,000 posts about more than 90,000 different places in 123 countries around the world, Hoag told me.
The teams will be looking for ways to integrate that location and affinity data in with Tagged’s own offerings. Tagged has created a social network for connecting with existing friends, while also finding ways to get to know new people. One missing piece so far has been the idea of local discovery, which is what Urbantag excels at.
“We started talking and realized that a lot of what we were doing with social discovery for places coincided with what they were doing with social discovery for people,” Hoag told me. Specific details for how that data can be integrated hasn’t been figured out yet, but it will likely include ways for users to share their favorite local venues, leveraging Tagged’s vast distribution.
As part of the deal, the Urbantag co-founders have joined the Tagged team, with Hoag taking over as Director of Product and Van Niekerk becoming Director of Design there. Unlike some acquisitions of this nature, the Urbantag app will remain available for users to download and interact with, at least for the short term.
The acquisition comes after the social network raised an additional $15 million in funding in August from Lighthouse Capital Partners and Comerica Bank. In 2011, it acquired a number of companies, including hi5, Digsby, Topicmarks, and WeGame. It has been profitable for years, and last year grew revenues 35 percent to $43 million.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Hoag says all stakeholders involved were happy with the outcome. Urbantag’s investors included BranchOut co-founder Rick Marini, Aardvark co-founder Max Ventilla, former SNOCAP CEO Rusty Rueff, and angel investor Roham Gharegozlou, among others.