Yahoo has acquired Rockmelt, the social browser-turned social news app. It has been on an acquisition spree since CEO Marissa Mayer took over last year, and Rockmelt continues the trend of Yahoo’s interest in mobile and social news.
Om wrote about Rockmelt back in 2010, when the company was still focused on doing a social browser for the web. It raised $30 million in 2011 from investors including Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz to work on this goal, but Rockmelt has since pivoted away from doing a social browser and is focusing on doing social news apps. We wrote about the company’s move to Android in June, at which point it seemed fairly unlikely that consumers needed yet another place to share cool links.
Yahoo announced the acquisition of Rockmelt, which AllThingsD reports was for $60 million to $70 million, in a blog post
“We’re excited to announce that Yahoo! has acquired Rockmelt!
Rockmelt was designed to make sense of the Internet. The team has built a simple and beautiful technology that combines social, personalization and discovery to help you not only find what you’re looking for, but also stumble across some cool stuff along the way.
The parallels between Yahoo! and Rockmelt are obvious: we share a common goal to help people discover the best personalized content from around the web. We can’t wait to integrate the Rockmelt technology into our platform as we work to deliver the best experiences to our users in new and exciting ways.”
Rockmelt wrote in a blog post that its existing products will be shut down on Aug. 31.
