Facebook is the most popular and largest social networking site with users spread all over the world. Started by Mark Zuckerberg and other students of Harvard University during their college days, it has grown into a multi-billion dollar business now. At the time of its launch, it was a site for the students at Harvard and was called Facemash. Later, it grew into a big brand, all thanks to its strategies.
There is no denying that Facebook has come a long way and this wouldn’t have been possible without the numerous acquisitions. It had to purchase many companies and their products and services to develop its own product and give the best social networking experience to its users.
Today, we have come up with 5 European startups that were acquired by Facebook till date to enhance its own product.
Chainspace (Gibraltar)
Founders – Dave Hrycyszyn, George Danezis, Ramsey Khoury, Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam and Shehar Bano
Chainspace was founded in 2018. It is an enterprise software startup that helps people develop high-performance blockchain applications using popular technologies and languages on the commodity cloud platforms. After the acquisition in February 2019, most employees of Chainspace have joined Facebook.
Bloomsbury AI (London)
Founders – Guillaume Bouchard, Tim Rocktäschel, Matko Bosnjak, Sameer Singh, Luis Ulloa, and Sebastian Riedel
London-based Bloomsbury AI was founded in 2015 to offer web services letting individuals use, create and share text-understanding computer applications. It has developed Cape, an AI to read documents and answer questions about their content. Facebook acquired this startup in January 2018 for nearly $30 million (around €26.5 million). Notably, Bloomsbury is an alumni of Entrepreneur first, a growth accelerator investing in domain and technical expertise talent.
Fayteq (Germany)
Founders – André Münnich
Established in 2011, Fayteq is a German startup that builds software add-ons for video editing. It add and remove whole objects from the captured video with the help of computer vision. In August 2017, this computer vision startup was acquired by Facebook. It could be useful to add objects to live videos and remove them on the fly and can be put to use in an effective way in the sector of augmented reality.
Two Big Ears (Edinburgh)
Founders – Abesh Thakur, Varun Nair
Two Big Ears was launched in 2013. After its acquisition by Facebook in 2016, this immersive audio company started making technology free as a part of their Facebook 360 Spatial Workshop. This company specialises in spatial 3D audio in both gaming and cinematic experiences.
Masquerade (Belarus)
Founders – Eugene Nevgen, Sergey Gonchar and Eugene Zatepyakin
Belarus-based Masquerade was is behind the MSQRD app letting users app filters and effects to their selfies. Founded in 2010, this startup was acquired by Facebook in 2016 but the financial details of the deal were not disclosed. Back then, it was said that the social networking giant will keep the app live and use its technology on the Messenger app.
Stay tuned to Silicon Canals for more updates in the tech startup world.
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