Twitter in talks to acquire ZipDial, says report

If the deal gets through, ZipDial would become Twitter’s first acquisition in India

Micro blogging platform Twitter is in talks to acquire ZipDial, Bengaluru-based mobile value-added service company, technology news portal TechCrunch said.

Its report quoting multiple sources said the California-based company might have already closed the deal.

“The information we’ve been hearing pegs a deal between the companies at different stages. Sources tell us that it has already closed and is in the region of $30-40 million. It could be announced as soon as this week,” the report said.

Repeated attempts to reach to ZipDial founders for comments did not yield any results. In a reply to an email query, a Twitter spokesperson said, “We don’t comment on rumour and speculation”.

Founded in 2010 by Sanjay Swamy, Valerie Rozycki, and Amiya Pathak, ZipDial is a cloud-based mobile and analytics platform, which help companies reach out their targeted audience and do marketing through ‘missed calls’.

Swamy, also the founder of mobile payment start-up mCheck and a former technology volunteer at Unique Identification Authority of India, is currently the chairman of the firm.

ZipDial has raised undisclosed amount of funding from AngelPrime (Swamy is a managing partner there), Mumbai Angels, Jungle Ventures, 500 Startups and Times Internet.

If the deal gets completed, ZipDial would become Twitter’s first acquisition in India.

The fledgling Indian start-up space has started getting attention from global technology firms looking for acquisitions.

In December 2013, social networking site Facebook had acquired Little Eye Labs, a Bengaluru-based start-up that used to develop software tool to analyse the performance of Android apps.