After 9 years of providing mobile and internet-based messaging services to hundreds of millions of users worldwide, eBuddy has been acquired by hotel booking platform and fellow Dutch company Booking.com.
In an announcement earlier today, eBuddy revealed it had entered into an ‘acqui-hire’ agreement. The company posted:
“For over 9 years we have been offering Chat and messaging products for hundreds of millions of users worldwide.”
“For over 9 years we have been offering Chat and messaging products for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Together with Booking.com we are excited to add our experience and enthusiasm to their team in Amsterdam.
We really enjoyed the years of building great eBuddy products and are very excited participating in building out Booking.com’s great product.”
This isn’t the first messaging acquisition or attempted acquisition of a messaging service we’ve witnessed this year. Genband successfully acquired Fring for $50 million back in September and Facebook failed to charm Snapchat into an acquisition in mid-November despite a steep $3 billion dollar offer.
There was no mention as to what exactly eBuddy would be doing for the Booking.com service, but we’ve reached out to both companies to see if we could clarify some information and will update this article with any additional info we obtain.