New Delhi: Yahoo has acquired Bangalore-based startup Bookpad for Rs 50 crore, a startup that's barely a year old and founded by three youngsters who passed out of IIT-Guwahati over the past three years. The deal comes some eight months after Facebook snapped up Bangalore's Little Eye Labs.
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.
Bookpad deals in a product called Docspad, which 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.
Docspad supports Word, Powerpoint, Excel, PDF, ODT, ODP, ODX, ePub 2.0, and all common image formats.
For Yahoo, a content provider, the use of this technology can prove useful as it can potentially embed it in many of its services.
Bookpad's founders include Aditya Bandi, 25, Niketh Sabbineni, 24, and Ashwik Battu, 23. Bandi graduated with a degree in design from IIT-Guwahati in 2011 and had brief stints at Microsoft, Cognizant and Symantec.
Experts say the growing number of buyouts in the software product startup space is a testimony of Indian startup ecosystem maturing and catching the eye of global majors.
