Croak.it, a Reddit for sound clips, gets acquired

Exotel, a Bangalore-based cloud telephony company, is set to acquire Singapore-based voice sharing social media startup Croak.it, according to a report by the Economic Times. The terms of the deal have been left undisclosed.

Founded in 2012 by Protik Roychowdhury and Srinivasa Teja, Croak.it is a sound sharing app which allows users to share their voice messages in clips lasting 30 seconds. Other users can them upvote or downvote these posts, rather like with Reddit.

“A person’s voice is unique and personal. The idea when we started Croak.it was to provide easily accessible voice solutions to consumers, enabling them to express themselves better,“ said Roychowdhury.

The site has over a million recordings and the startup was clocking 25+ hours of audio everyday. The homepage looks a bit dead, with all the “trending” posts several months old.

“We did not update the trending posts, since we wanted to keep the content that came up there appropriate for the kids,” said Roychowdhury to Tech in Asia.

In the past six months, Croak.it rolled back their offerings and focused on the 200-odd schools using their services. Most of the schools using the service are located in the US, with a few located in France, the UK, and Iceland.

“There was a good overlap in the nature of the problem we were solving. Voice will continue to remain at the centre of most business communications,” said Shivakumar Ganesan, co-founder and CEO of Exotel.

This is the first acquisition for Exotel. Launched in 2011, the startup raised series A funding of US$ 400,000 from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures. Last year it launched Dialmonk, an app which allows users to sync their mobile phone and computer.

Exotel competes with Sequoia-backed Knowlarity, which acquired Delhi-based cloud telephony startup Unicom Techlabs last year.

Source: (The Economic Times)

See: Croak.It wants to be the voice of the web