The past year 2016 was an active year for Snapchat, a messaging app company that is now making a lot of business acquisitions and consolidations to establish its foothold in Silicon Valley. The company bought up Israeli startup company Cimagine Media for an estimated $30 million to $40 million according to Techcrunch just last week.
The New York Post had earlier reported that Snapchat was in the process of buying up Cimagine and the deal may be closed soon, but it has now become a reality.
Cimagine was founded by four computer vision and image processing experts: Ozi Egri, Amiram Avraham, Nir Daube and CEO Yoni Nevo. Established in 2012, the company developed a visual reality technology that allows consumers to visually place any home appliance or furniture which they intend to buy in their intended position in the home, all on their mobile phones.
This technology was known as the True Markerless Augmented Reality. Cimagine partnered with a furniture store in Southern California and other brands such as Coca-Cola to virtually place products in the virtual homes of prospective customers via their smartphones.
In the course of its existence, Cimagine had raised several funding from investors such as PLUS Ventures, iVentures Asia, and OurCrowd among others to finance its operations.
This purchase is a big plus for messaging app Snapchat, considering the fact that the company is set to raise an IPO that could net the organization between $20 billion and $25 billion by March 2017.
Before the purchase of Cimagine, Snapchat had noiselessly acquired adtech company Flite for an undisclosed amount of money, bought up mobile search app Vurb for about $110 million, purchased computer vision startup Seene, and personalized emojis maker Bitstrips for $100 million among other silent acquisitions.
Snapchat is not done yet with its acquisition spree, it is looking forward to doing better by collaborating with department stores and big-box retailers to increase consumer mobile site engagements so as to enhance customer conversion on purchase sites.
It is not yet known what the messaging app company has up its sleeve for 2017, but the company is gearing up to advance itself in the tech industry as a leader in its own right.