According to the latest reports, Twitter has acquired London-based Sphere, which operates a group chat application of the same name. This is the latest in a series of recent actions by the social network because it wants to actively expand and Improve its products and services.
The sphere was founded by Tomas Halgas and Nick D’Aloisio, the latter once founded the news summary app Summly, which he sold to Yahoo for $30 million at the age of 17. The company did not disclose the financial details of the transaction. According to reports, the startup has raised at least $30 million – including $11.8 million in the first two rounds of funding first reported by TechCrunch.
A Twitter spokesperson confirmed the acquisition of Sphere to TechCrunch. Sphere said in a blog post: Like everyone else, we have been following and admiring Twitter’s increasing investment in community building, publishing community, space, and safety-promoting features. When we met this team, we were even more impressed with their seriousness in pursuing interest-based communities and their confidence in its potential impact.
Sphere said that as part of this move, about 20 of its employees will join Twitter, and the startup will close its standalone application next month. The startup did not disclose the number of users or customers it has accumulated.
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It’s been a long and exciting journey to get to this point. Like many startups, Sphere has a very different mission from the beginning – to help anyone find and share knowledge instantly by building a global brain’. We initially established a market of paid experts from all over the world and connected them through group chats, the startup said in a blog post.
What we realize is that some of the most helpful and knowledgeable conversations come from groups where members have a strong sense of belonging to each other. In other words, the core of our challenge is to help everyone find their community. The opportunity is huge.
This move is due to Twitter’s apparently more aggressive expansion of its product offerings in recent quarters. The company tried to acquire Clubhouse, launched a similar feature this year, and recently took some measures to curb non-compliance speech on its platform.