LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.
Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been rumors about talks between the two companies for a few weeks now.
“We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse’s considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience in a statement today. “To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”
Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Standford University. The service started out as an iOS app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the web. As Pulse co-founder Akshay Kothari writes in his announcement today that the “Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.”
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