Yahoo has just acquired Rockmelt: a social networking-focused web browser and content consumption startup. Yahoo paid $60-70 million for the company that received more than $40 million in funding from investors like Accel Partners amongst others. Yahoo will shut down the service on August 31st, 2013 and will be integrating its services throughout the Yahoo ecosystem.
Yahoo made the following statement about its acquisition of Rockmelt on its blog:
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 was founded in 2009 by Eric Vishria and Tim Howes. Originally, the startup launched Rockmelt as a social networking-based web browser that integrated with Facebook to provide for an easier notification checking and instant messaging experience. The company later switched its focus to content consumption by launching a new website and set of mobile apps that slightly resembled a finely tuned version of Flipboard with a wider-range of content.