Yesterday, Apple has officially acquired Concept.io Inc. The sources also suggest that after acquiring, the technology giant has already discontinued the startup's Swell mobile app which is a mobile streaming-content app.
This acquisition by Apple can be counted as the latest in the string of deals by the technology giant and could reflects Apple’s aim of achieving a much larger role in streaming audio and music content.
The deal for the two year old startup was reportedly locked by Apple at a whopping $30 million. Concept.io was valued at $19 million when it closed its Series A funding round in July last year.
The Swell app delivers a personalized audio news feed from websites such as Harvard Business Review, NPR and TED Talks. It works quite similar to what Pandora does for music. The content is suggested based on the data collected by the app when the user skips or stays on a particular content.
Conecpt.io was incubated at venture firm Charles River Ventures where the company’s chief executive and founder Ram Ramkumar worked as an entrepreneur in residence. In a funding event organized by the company last year which was labeled as an oversubscribed funding event by the company’s chief executive, the company had raised an astonishing $5.4 million. This along with the$1.2 million raised in the previous seed funding was going to help the startup flourish and improve its app. The application saw its last update on December 2013.
The startup’s investors included names like InterWest Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Correlation Ventures, Google Ventures and Draper Nexus Ventures.
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