SimpleGeo, the once promising location startup, has been acquired, I’ve heard. The buyer is Urban Airship.
This is an all stock acquisition apparently, totaling around $3.5 million in value. Since SimpleGeo has raised nearly $10 million in venture capital, it’s likely that all or nearly all of the acquisition price would go to the last round investors due to their liquidity preference.
It’s a soft landing for SimpleGeo. But at least the service may live on.
Urban Airship has raised $6.5 million.
Uncrunched 
Wait a minute! What’s the valuation of Urban Airship?
Yea, I would have thought this was the other way around…
Exactly Urban Airship hasn’t done huge things and I thought SimpleGeo was doing fairly well, shame they gave up. Not good for Jay Adelson after Digg. I mean they could’ve pivoted or tried to spin all the value they had in an interesting way. But I guess they’d rather just get out.
gdfgdfgdf
Great scoop, surprised by the number though, seems like a low exit for SimpleGeo.
SimpleGeo have been trying to raise a new round for a while now so they obviously ran out of cash and had to take whatever offer they could.
IMO the company was too fat – 25 people, a big name (and likely big pay packet) CEO, $10M raised. Pricing was very wrong (it is a web service people, not 1980’s enterprise software) and nobody knew what the fuck the product was. You need a lot of traction to keep that going with investors before they decide enough is enough.
This merger makes sense, but I would go even further. They should roll up all of these startups that provide web services for mobile developers into a single large SaaS provider for mobile app developers. Urban Airship & SimpleGeo together provide only Geo and Push, but if you add the other pieces of the puzzle (like suprfeedr for pubsub, app marketing, analytics with someone like kotagent) and provide a one-stop shop for all services you may be onto something
Jay Adelson should have went out and raised $50M on that premise – to roll each of these guys up into one corp. At least that way your company can’t disappear overnight because Apple or Google decide to offer one of these API’s for free.
What’s the source? Is this confirmed? I couldn’t find any announcements anywhere.
Same here, want more info on this deal
Confirmed on their respective blogs, but the terms of the deal were not disclosed
If I got those terms I wouldn’t disclose them either 🙂
Legitimately laughed out loud. Nice one Jose.
An argument can be made that purchase price of a private company when acquired by another private company doesn’t mean much. It all depends on the growth rate of UA and what investors believe they percentage ownership in UA might be worth. Its a bit like having Facebook offer you 3.5m and then in your head figuring it would be worth $7m in 24 months.
I hear some really interesting acquisitions happen down here in LA. I wonder how a newly minted VC could find out about some of that deal flow? Hmmmmmm if there was only a way for someone to speak in front of 500 LA entrepreneurs on December 1st, what a great opportunity that would be…
Jason,
What an amazing opportunity! If I was a newly minted VC, I would tooootallly speak in LA in front of 500 entrepreneurs on December 1st.
I really wish Arrington hadn’t turned comments off on the “Racist” post, because, frankly, as I think CNN should be embarrassed. As a minority myself, I’m tired of seeing race used to attack people, like CNN used it to attack Arrington, and so dishonestly.
If you’re going to play the race card, you better have the facts lined up ,and if you want to be considered a reputable journalist, you better give your intended victim the opportunity to prepare — in advance– before answering the charge.
CNN loses all credibility. I often don’t agree with Arrington about a lot of things, but he keeps showing up with more integrity than others.
And I shudder to think how many ignorant americans rant on and on about “fox news” but think CNN preaches the gospel. (proof positive that stupid people are easily led by dishonest people.)
We use Urban airship in our apps and they are a great team to work with. They answer bug reports crazy fast and are a super swell team.
If you read their blog post it sounds like more of a merger. And a pretty genuine one at that: http://blog.simplegeo.com/2011/10/31/taking-our-relationship-with-urban-airship-to-a-cruising-altitude/
It may technically be a merger but call it what is is: a huge loss for investors in Simplegeo. They took $3.5m of STOCK (which is basically worthless at this point) in a company that will likely go out of business itself at some point. Simplegeo had taken $10m in VC capital. Do the math. It’s a fire sale. Investors in Simplegeo took an absolute bath.
Probando
Mike I am an entrepreneur in Tel Aviv from America, I have recently started a new blog: legendarymoves.com . Please you invented the modern tech blog, give me your thoughts.
legendarymoves.com is the name of the blog
It’s amazing how Tech Crunch is spinning this as some sort of win for SimpleGeo. Clearly, the company failed and its remaining ‘assets’ are being rolled up into a company with similarly unlikely prospects for success. The investors in SimpleGeo exchanged $10m in worthless stock for $3.5m in almost-worthless stock.
I guess it’s not that amazing, actually, considering all the sloppy tongue baths that MG Siegler gave to SimpleGeo. The endless hype was hilariously sickening, and the puff piece on the company’s failure was the cherry on top that MG had to force a deputy to write.
I wish Mike didnt turn off the comments on the CNN posts.
I am Mexican and live in Chicago but I completely agree with Mike on why there arent many minority start ups. There just is not a mainstream push for minorities to get into something like this and believe that they will be successful.
I think differently though, which is why I am starting my own informative social network aimed at Latinos. The network is informative because my goal is to bring together great hispanic minds that want to push forward, think differently, and actually believe they can succeed. I hope I can help some hispanics believe they can make it in silicon valley.
Speaking as an intelligent software developer who is surrounded by morons, I can kind of understand your situation.
You can’t reason with a horde of inferior people. Try to focus on something else that is positive in your life. And if someone negatively brings up the race thing, tell him to go fuck himself, and end it at that.
Mitch Kapor I think is saying something similar to Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink book.
They both I think grasp the thrust of what we’ve learned about our brains in recent years.
I find it confusing that anyone would interpret anything either of them said on those topics as justifying racism?
Could you explain how?