Big news for a Monday morning: Onavo, the Israeli mobile analytics company, has just announced that it has been acquired by Facebook. Onavo in turn will become the anchor for Facebook in Israel — its first office in the country. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed. We are trying to find out.
Facebook has been focusing on building up its mobile business, which is seeing the most growth and is the platform that most users in developing markets are turning to first when signing up for and using the social networking service. Onavo will give the company a much deeper tech bench to measure how its mobile services are working. It will also be a very strong play to attract more mobile developers to Facebook overall.
Sidenote: Facebook was reportedly interested in buying Waze, the social/mobile mapping company that eventually got sold to Google. One of the sticking points of that deal (reportedly) was that Facebook wanted all of Waze in Menlo Park’s HQ. Today’s deal shows that Facebook clearly isn’t adverse to having a presence in the country after all.
More to come.
We are excited to announce that Facebook has agreed to acquire our company.
Three years ago, we started Onavo with the goal of helping today’s technology consumers and companies work more efficiently in a mobile world. We developed the award-winning Onavo mobile utility apps, and later launched Onavo Insights, the first mobile market intelligence service based on real engagement data. Our service helps people save money through more efficient use of data, and also helps developers, large and small, design better experiences for people.
We’ve built world-class products and a remarkably talented team which has pioneered important breakthroughs in data compression technology and mobile analytics. Today, we’re eager to take the next step and make an even bigger impact by supporting Facebook’s mission to connect the world.
As you know, Facebook and other mobile technology leaders recently launched Internet.org, formalizing Facebook’s commitment to improving access to the internet for the next 5 billion people — this is a challenge we’re also passionate about.
We’re excited to join their team, and hope to play a critical role in reaching one of Internet.org’s most significant goals – using data more efficiently, so that more people around the world can connect and share. When the transaction closes, we plan to continue running the Onavo mobile utility apps as a standalone brand. As always, we remain committed to the privacy of people who use our application and that commitment will not change.
We are incredibly proud of the talented team we have assembled, and, recognizing this, Onavo’s Tel-Aviv office will remain open for business and will become Facebook’s new Israeli office.
We’ll continue to advance the work we are doing in collaboration with Facebook’s great team. Thank you to everyone who has joined us on this journey. We’d like to extend a special thanks to our investors, who believed in us and in our vision from the early days. We’re excited for what’s next.
