Marking its first acquisition in India, Twitter on Tuesday announced acquisition of Bangalore-based mobile marketing start-up ZipDial.
“India is one of the fastest growing countries for us and this acquisition is an important signal to how serious we are about this market. Our number one objective in the country has been to grow our user base. This acquisition will dramatically increase our ability to drive this growth,” Twitter Market Director (India and Southeast Asia) Rishi Jaitly told The Hindu .
ZipDial offers services like missed calls for user verification, alerts and other use cases. While the deal size was not disclosed, according to reports is it pegged at about $30 million.
It has about 50 employs in India, all of whom will be now part of Twitter. This acquisition will also bring Twitter a new engineering office in Bangalore.
“We have a office in Bangalore, which will become the base of Twitter’s research and development in India,” Valerie Wagoner, Founder and CEO, ZipDial said.
On the acquisition, she added, “Indian users behave very differently from those in the US. For example an Indian user use 60 MB of mobile data on an average, which is 4.5 per cent of the data that a US user of using monthly... Our platform will help Twitter engage users offline and help bridge the gap between online and offline world."
After India, Jaitly said the platform will be applied to other emerging economies such as Indonesia and Brazil.
ZipDial engages nearly 60 million users through its platform with hundreds of marketer clients, including leading brands and media companies, including Procter & Gamble, Cadbury, Unilever, Colgate, Disney, MakeMyTrip, and Amazon.