GoDaddy, the Scottsdale, Arizona domain seller and small business platform, acquired Locu, a former MIT startup dedicated to helping local businesses get discovered, for a rumored $70 million in cash and stock, sources told AllThingsD.
"If you think about small businesses, they generally get online and have an idea in their head about what they want. First, they'll go on and register exactly their domain," GoDaddy CEO and former Yahoo! CEO told BostInno in a conversation. "The next thing they want to do is build a website, but they really just want to be relevant on the Internet and want to be found. They want a web presence, and they want their digital identity to be as present as possible, like real estate in a mall."
GoDaddy bought up Locu to move forward with what AllThingsD terms an "aggressive strategy" to build out the company's online offerings to small businesses. With Locu's 30,000 businesses, including restaurants, spas, salons, accountants, photographers and home-remodeling companies, and more than 200-million using consumers per month, the acquisition is certainly a step in the right direction for the domain giant.
"Locu epitomizes what GoDaddy is all about – both companies are hell-bent on helping the ‘little guy’ thrive on the Internet,” said GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving in the release. “Locu is comprised of amazing technologists who have taken the very complex problem of helping small businesses ‘get found’ wherever consumers are looking and are solving it through elegant, technology-based services.”
The two companies hooked up in May when GoDaddy first integrated Locu into its easy-to-use Website Builder, which enabled local restaurants to create, manage and update their menus, thus giving them complete control of their digital identity.
“We couldn’t think of a more powerful platform to accelerate Locu’s growth,” said Rene Reinsberg, CEO and co-founder of Locu in the firm's release. “We each have a core mission to help local businesses succeed."
Locu will continue to operate out of its offices in Cambridge and San Francisco, both of which it has plans to hire from post-acquisition. The startup will also keep all of its current employees.
Founded out of MIT in 2011, Locu helps local business publish real-time information on their web and mobile sites, as well as partner sites like Foursquare, OpenTable, TripAdvisor and Yelp. To date, the company has received $4.6 million in financial backing from investors General Catalyst, Lowercase, Lightbank and SV Angel, as well as a handful of prominent angels including HubSpot's very own Dharmesh Shah, Bruno Bowden from Google, Andrew McCollum from Facebook and Michael Abbott from Twitter.
