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Today, Twitter announced its agreement to acquire Boulder-based Gnip in a blog post welcoming the social data provider into its “flock.”
Gnip started right here in Boulder back in 2008 and has since raised over $6 million thanks to Foundry Group. Co-founder and CTO Jud Valeski previously described Gnip's first year as heading the wrong way ("180 degrees wrong" to be more specific) in the ill-defined space of social media.
But flash forward to 2014, Gnip has offices in San Francisco, DC and New York which have helped them to service customers across various industries like ad tech, retail and finance. Gnip customers get access to both historical and real-time social data analytics (for example, Gnip has delivered over 2.3 trillion Tweets to customers so far). Additionally, in December 2012, Gnip launched its “Plugged in to Gnip” program with partners such as Salesforce, Pivotal and Klout using its social data.
Although Twitter plans to make data “available to Gnip’s growing customer base,” this acquisition news will likely bring up conflicts of interest for Gnips partners and customers, which include Twitter competitors and peers like Sina Weibo (a Chinese microblogging service), Tumblr and Foursquare.
Under the leadership of Valeski and CEO Chris Moody, the company has grown to nearly 100 employees and plans to stay operating locally under its own brand after the acquisition is complete: “We pride ourselves on solving interesting problems, always pushing ourselves and little, if any, compromise -- and all of that is a reflection of the Boulder area to me," Valeski said.
