In its first major acquisition since raising $25 million in venture capital funds last year, Coinbase has bought the company behind content-sharing platforms Kippt and Inc. Although never well-known outside of the Silicon Valley startup community, the Y Combinator-based Kippt project was seen by many as an innovative sharing platform with an exceptionally powerful API. Given Coinbase’s recent focus on developer adoption of its API, the Kippt acquisition isn’t surprising.
Coinbase’s team also shares a great deal of history with Kippt’s, as the two companies were part of the same 2012 Y Combinator class. Although the terms of the deal have not been disclosed, it is known that Kippt founders Jori Lallo and Karri Saarinen will be receiving both cash and Coinbase stock.
In a blog post about the acquisition, Lallo and Saarinen confirm that Kippt, and its business-oriented variant Inc, will be discontinued in favor of Coinbase-oriented projects.
This marks the end of the journey for us at Kippt. Although our service has been loved by many, we never achieved the growth and the scale that would allow a sustainable future for Kippt. Building personal knowledge online continues to be a unsolved problem.
A post on the Coinbase blog confirms that the Kippt team will be focusing on API-related tasks, “to help us continue to make bitcoin easy to use for the everyday consumer, merchant, and developer.”
