Yahoo acquires one-year-old Bangalore startup Bookpad

Just days after business intelligence provider Nielsen (NYSE:NLSN) acquired Indicus Analytics, another Indian startup got netted by a global company. Yahoo has bought one-year-old Bookpad, which built an end-to-end document handling technology for the cloud, for about US$15 million (INR 90 crore) The Times of India reported. It is the first Indian tech startup acquisition by the internet giant.

Founded by three young engineers from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati – Aditya Bandi, Niketh Sabbineni, and Ashwik Reddy – in 2013, Bookpad was backed by NASSCOM’s 10,000 Startups initiative and Microsoft Ventures accelerator. The startup was part of the first batch of startups in NASSCOM’s co-working hub Startup Warehouse. Its flagship product, Docspad, enables document embedding, annotations, and editing in enterprise applications.

“We built Docspad for a singular purpose: any app out there that deals with documents should be able to let the users open, edit and collaborate on those documents, from right inside the app. With Docspad, we’re helping to build a web where no one needs to download any document,” co-founder and CEO Bandi says in the company blog.

Most people use Google docs for this today. Docspad, though, is for developers. They can use it to improve applications that they build to bring them on par with what Google docs enables. Bandi explains:

Other applications like applicant-tracking systems, file-sharing apps, conferencing solutions, learning management solutions, etc used by millions of users worldwide are unable to provide the same features and user experience as Google docs does. We exist to help.

Docspad supports Word, Powerpoint, Excel, PDF, ODT, ODP, ODX, ePub 2.0, and all common image formats.

A few months ago, the Bangalore-based startup kicked off Docspad for OpenSource, a program under which it gave contributing developers free access to all Docspad APIs, promising to bear server costs, compute costs, and storage costs for all their use cases, forever. It will be interesting to see if the acquisition by Yahoo will change this.

In January this year, social network titan Facebook acquired another Bangalore startup Little Eye Labs, which makes a testing and analytics tool for Android developers to improve app performance.

Indian tech startups have been attracting higher levels of venture capital funding, and now, acquisitions too seem to be picking up. Initiatives like NASSCOM’s Innotrek program, which showcases hand-picked Indian tech startups before global giants, lets entrepreneurs explore opportunities for growth, mergers, and acquisitions. Bookpad was part of Innotrek’s first trip to Silicon Valley.

The Indian Software Product Industry Round-Table (iSPIRT), an industry think tank, also has an M&A Connect initiative to help Indian startups become more visible around the world, and it also helps them improve their marketing and bring their accounting practices up to global standards.

See: Here’s an indicator of just how immature the Indian startup ecosystem is compared to Israel

Source: The Times of India