Domain giant GoDaddy scooped up its second Boston-area company in the past twelve months. On Wednesday, the company acqui-hired Canary, a Techstars Boston alum and smart calendar app based in Cambridge. GoDaddy is also opening up an office in Cambridge later this month.
According to TechCrunch, GoDaddy has “no intentions” of folding the Canary application into its current product lineup, but the local startup said that the app “will not be shut down in the immediate future.” Wrote the Canary team in a blog post:
Canary will continue to work as a standalone app on your iPhone, and you should have no problems with it unless there is a major change to one of the underlying services. We will make sure that Canary remains available on the App Store until we're confident all of our existing users have had a chance to upgrade.
Besides the small seed of $10,000 that comes with participating in the Techstars program, Canary did not take on any other funding. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it’s likely a small deal based on talent, not technology, according to the report.
Canary co-founders (and ex-Googlers) are Shaun Seo and Varun Chirravuri. Seo and Chirravuri, along with two other team members, grew the app’s userbase to more than 100,000 customers.
In the wake of the deal, Seo and Chirravui will join GoDaddy’s team in California to work on the company’s 25- to 30-person presence and commerce team. The two other team members were offered jobs, but declined to make the move.
Last August, GoDaddy acquired MIT startup Locu, a company that helps small businesses and restaurants get listed on search engines like Google and apps like Yelp, for a rumored $70 million in stock and cash.
Image via Apptentive
