Facebook buys VC-backed Little Eye Labs
Within 19 months of starting-up, Bangalore-based Little Eye Labs was snapped up by Facebook to take the social network’s mobile development to the next level. Little Eye Labs was also in talks with Twitter, but Facebook ended up offering a better deal. The team will now relocate to the US firm’s headquarters in California.
While the price paid by Facebook for its first Indian acquisition has not been disclosed, it is reported to be $10-15 million.
Little Eye's software provides mobile app performance analysis and monitoring tools that help Android app developers benchmark and optimize consumption of system resources, such as power, wireless data, GPS, disk consumption and memory. It is similar to Crittercism, the mobile app performance management start-up that counts Google Ventures, Opus Capital and Shasta Ventures as investors.
Little Eye released the official version of its product in April 2013. Some of the bigger name customers it attracted were Intel, QualComm, Citrix and GE Medical Systems.
The company was founded in May 2012 with the idea to develop tools for mobile app developers. The team had experience working on software development platforms and wanted to extend that learning into the mobile space.
It was inducted into GSF Accelerator's first batch of companies in December that year and raised $25,000 from the program. In 2013 it raised a seed round of INR15 million ($244,000) from GSF and the Ventureast Tenet Fund. Each investor contributed half the sum, with existing investor GSF ending up with a 15% stake to Ventureast's 10%.
The company's product gained traction through word of mouth as well as active marketing in the online developer community. "They created a core group of developers and worked on feedback from them," explains SateeshAndra, managing partner at Ventureast. The current product version has been made easy-to-use, with an intuitive user interface and no coding required to setup.
GSF Accelerator and Superangels founder Rajesh Sawhney says the company was always globally oriented and active in industry conferences and events abroad. It was at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco in May last year that the team met Facebook.
Facebook has been on an acquisitions spree to boost its mobile offering as an increasing number of users access the site from handheld devices. In 2013 it bought cloud app platform Parse and Tel Aviv-based mobile analytics company Onavo. It followed these up with Branch Media, the start-up behind conversation service Branch and link-sharing service Potluck.
SateeshAndra, managing partner at Ventureast calls the deal an "outlier" as early stage companies in the technology sector usually take about three-five years before meeting that kind of success.
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