Google Acquires Zenter; Y Combinator Gets Another Payday

Google made another acquisition announcement today – they’ve bought a company called Zenter (“a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations”) to help complete their upcoming Powerpoint/presentation application. The price wasn’t disclosed.

This is another liquidity event for Y Combinator, which funded Zenter (we covered their debut here).

Google has been rumored to be creating an online Powerpoint clone since February. In April the rumors were confirmed by Eric Schmidt and then on the Google blog. As with the other applications in Google Docs & Spreadsheets, most of the technology seems to be imported. Google previously acquired Tonic Systems for their presentation technology.

Zenter was focusing on the front end of the application, as well as community/sharing features. It complements Tonic, which focused on the back end technology for converting powerpoint presentations into Java objects. Zenter takes a more social look at slide shows, letting users share their projects and incorporate content directly from the web, including Google Images.

You can see coverage on other Y Combinator startups (like Weebly, Buxfer, Writewith, Overhear.us, Snipshot, Justin.tv, and Xobni) here and here.