Summify sold to Twitter, principals heading south
Ten months after launching a unique news service, Vancouver startup Summify has been gobbled up by Twitter.
The Romania- born principals of Summify, Mircea Pasol and Cristian Strat, announced in a blog on Thursday they’ve been acquired by Twitter — and they’ll be moving to Silicon Valley to guide their enterprise as members of Twitter’s “growth team” at company headquarters in San Francisco.
Several features of Summify have been suspended and it’s “disabling” new account registrations and “at some point we will shut down the current Summify product” the blog said.
Financial terms were not announced.
Summify took a unique approach to news aggregation, looking at its clients’ social profiles as well as news and information preferences.
That could mean pulling stories or information from diverse sources such as Twitter or Facebook for a customized news package based on an assuming that you share an interest in particular story subjects with your friends and followers in social media.
“Our long- term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most timeefficient manner,” the company said in blog posted Thursday to announce the sale. “As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale.
“Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.”
Pasol and Strat had previously worked in Silicon Valley, but were living in Romania until they were accepted two years ago for a stint with Vancouver Internet startup company incubator Bootup Labs.
The company also caught the attention of a continentwide group of angel and venture capital investors including Boris Wertz and Andrew Braccia.
“In March 2011 we launched our email summary product and we’ve been blown away by the response ever since. Many of our users tell us we found a magical solution to a truly unsolved problem,” said the blog.
Online observers such as Techcrunch suggest Twitter may have acquired Summify primarily to retain the services of its principals, given that the service is unlikely to continue in its present form.
“We are offering a more streamlined service as we [ change] our efforts to working at Twitter,” the blog said.