Mobile bookmarking startup Spool acquired by Facebook; founder Avichal Garg moves to FB

Spool, a mobile bookmarking startup, has been acquired by social networking giant Facebook. The acquisition has been made more for the team rather the product itself. As part of the acquisition, the entire team of Spool, including founders Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer, has joined Facebook, although the startup's mobile bookmarking service has been shut down (as of 14th July, 2012).

"We started Spool to make content easy to consume on a mobile device. To accomplish this, we built some very sophisticated technology and developed a deep expertise in mobile software development. We are proud to announce that from today we will be pursuing our vision as a part of Facebook," wrote Garg in an official Spool blog post.

The company had first informed about the shutting down of Spool on its official blog, later adding information about the Facebook acquisition. The company has also offered instructions to Spool users for importing their bookmarks into another service (like Pocket, Delicious, etc.) and for the same, all Spool users were sent an e-mail with their bookmarks attached as bookmarks.html.

The San Francisco-based startup was founded by Garg (CEO) and Spencer (CTO) in 2010. Prior to Spool, Garg had founded PrepMe, which was acquired by Ascend Learning/Providence Equity Partners. Prior to PrepMe, Garg was working as a product manager at Google. He holds a B.S. degree in computer science and a M.S. degree in management science and engineering, both from Stanford University. The mobile bookmarking service allowed users to save text, image, and video content to mobile devices and view it later, either online or offline. Users could also push content to other mobile devices with the help of the service.

Early this year, the startup had raised $1 million in seed funding from a number of investors including SVAngel, StartFund, Felicis Ventures, Charles River Ventures, Steve Chen (the founder of YouTube), Vivi Nevo, among others (For a complete investor list click here).

The service was still in private beta at the time of receiving the investment. "We have raised money to continue building a product and will be investing heavily in improving SpoolBot, polishing our mobile and browser applications, among others," Avichal had written in an official blog post then.

(Edited by Prem Udayabhanu)