This is the second recent acquisition announcement for Hearst Interactive Media – UGO for around $100 million last month, and tonight they are announcing the acquisition of Kaboodle, a social shopping service that launched in late 2005.
Kaboodle, founded by Manish Chandra, Keiron McCammon, Chetan Pungaliya, closed a key distribution deal with eBay a year ago. Comscore numbers show rapid growth, with 2 million or so unique monthly visitors currently.
The acquisition price is not being disclosed, but we’re hearing it was somewhere between $30 – $40 million, all cash. The company raised three rounds of financing totaling $5 million from Shea Ventures, Kanwal Rekhi, Jeff Clavier, Ron Conway, Garage Ventures, Georges Harik, Rajeev Motwani, Iggy Fanlo and others.
One other thing we’ve heard – investor Ron Conway was “instrumental” in putting this deal together.
What happen to Duncan?
This business model had a slight edge that made it successful.
Shoppers could recommend and get noticed for their efforts
Consumers and retailers could both benefit by visiting this site to learn what to buy and what to sell.
This business model had a slight edge that made it more likely to be successful
– Shoppers could recommend and get noticed for their efforts
– Consumers and retailers could both benefit by visiting this site to learn what to buy and what to sell.
When will the acquisitions end?
Honestly, there are more acquisitions than startups now.
@ TechZilo
It’s better than the IPO boom that doomed the first bubble. Less collateral damage.
However, it is worrying that this might result in people creating companies to just flip into an acquisition instead of trying to create value added companies.
Wow, seems like everyone is getting acquired. Michael tell them my web 2.0 doo hickey is up for sale too!
StyleDiary’s next!
Manish did a great, great job at building that company. I was an advisor and am very happy to see the win for both him and Guy!
Congratulations for the buyers and the sellers!
Tanaka
CEO
http://www.boo-box.com
Congratulations to Manish and the entire Kaboodle team. I have used the product since they got their start and liked the functionality so much we built it into PriceFight as the default wish list manager. It is a great product backed by a phenomenal team.
Congratulations to the Kaboodle team! This is some great market validation for the social shopping space. As co-founder of Wishpot, a personal and social shopping utility, I firmly believe we have barely scratched the surface of the opportunity and innovation for social shopping.
Never heard of them before, and it seems like interesting enough to be added to our shopping section over at intelways.com
http://www.intelways.com
The one-stop search site.
Congrats to Kaboodle. It will be interesting to watch how Hearst further develops Kaboodle. Hearst will have a ton of great content in their archives that will seamlessly enhance the products featured on Kaboodle, providing even more relevant content for the community.
Since we’re buying and selling, can someone acquire foreignart.com too?
Kobe
http://www.ForeignArt.com