Automattic Acquires Beeper App for $125 Million to Create Unified Messaging Service
In a move to revolutionize the messaging app landscape, Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has acquired Beeper, the app that brought iPhone messaging features to Android smartphones. The deal, valued at about $125 million, was announced on Tuesday and aims to support the development of a single service for sending and receiving chats from various platforms including WhatsApp, Signal, LinkedIn, and more.
With regulators in Europe and the United States pushing for big tech companies to open their messaging services to third parties, Automattic sees an opportunity to create a unified messaging system that will make it easier for people to communicate and switch between messaging providers. Toni Schneider, Automattic’s interim chief executive, believes that the changing regulatory environment will drive interest in a service like Beeper.
This acquisition marks Automattic’s second foray into the messaging service space, following its purchase of Texts, an iPhone app that consolidates messages from various platforms. The teams behind Beeper and Texts will now work together to create a single app that will work seamlessly on both iPhones and Android smartphones, as well as computers.
Eric Migicovsky, co-founder of Beeper, expressed excitement about the combined service that Beeper and Texts will deliver this year. The teams will meet in Portugal to kick off the integration process and innovate in the messaging space. Beeper had previously released an app that allowed Android users to send encrypted messages and high-resolution videos to iPhones, gaining over 100,000 users in just three days before Apple blocked it by changing its iMessage system.
While a Justice Department lawsuit against Apple did not specifically mention Beeper, the issues highlighted by Beeper’s conflict with Apple were referenced in the complaint, which criticized Apple for rejecting solutions that could improve smartphone messaging. Beeper will soon be available for download to the public after a testing period that attracted 466,000 users on a waiting list, with 60 percent of them using Android smartphones.
Automattic, an early investor in Beeper, is confident in the potential of the unified messaging service and looks forward to the innovative solutions that the combined Beeper and Texts teams will bring to the market. With Beeper’s 27 employees now part of Automattic, the future of messaging apps is set to be transformed by this groundbreaking acquisition.
