Bookpad discontinues support to flagship product Docspad; acquisition by Yahoo now official

Bookpad Inc, which enabled customers to preview, edit and manage any documents on the cloud, has discontinued support for its flagship product Docspad. This follows a formal announcement on the acquisition of the company by Yahoo.

The firm also has a separate product Slidepad in beta testing phase currently. The status of this product is clear and unless Yahoo has acquired the firm for this product, it would mean the deal is in effect an acqui-hire. Yahoo is expected to announce its quarter results later in the day when it may disclose more information about the deal with Bookpad.

An email sent to Bandi for more details by Techcircle.in did not immediately elicit a response.

Although the deal was reported last month, there was no public announcement of the same.

In an official blog last week, co-founder of Bookpad and product manager at Yahoo, Aditya Bandi said, "We're excited to announce that we have been acquired by Yahoo. The past year has been a tremendous experience for all of us and we couldn't have reached this point without all of you. Although we can't talk details about the future just yet, we're looking forward to the next phase of our journey."

Bookpad, which is incorporated in the US with its development centre based in Bangalore, graduated from Microsoft Venture's fourth accelerator batch early this year. It was in in talks for angel funding but went ahead with a strategic sale instead.

Docspad was the company's flagship product which could be deployed through cloud APIs (where it is installed on cloud servers and managed by the firm), through private cloud (saved on cloud servers managed by users) or on premise (installed on user's servers managed by them directly). It came with white labelled viewer for each of the deployment options.

Early this year it had launched its second product called Slidepad, which is currently in beta. This product has to do with remote sharing of presentations. As of May this year, it had five paid customers for Slidepad and was in talks to rope in 11 more.

The venture was founded in early 2013 by three IIT graduates— Bandi, Ashwik Reddy and Niketh Sabbineni.

Bandi had brief stints at Microsoft, Cognizant and Symantec. While Sabbineni graduated in computer science in 2012, and worked briefly in Amazon, Battu, graduated as a chemical engineer just this year.

The deal comes among a string of transactions where large international firms have acquired new generation tech startup born in India.

In June London-based Globo plc, a provider of enterprise mobility management solutions and software as a service, acquired Bangalore- and San Francisco-based Sourcebits Inc, a developer of mobile apps and proprietary products for enterprise customers, for an undisclosed sum.

Last year Naspers acquired online bus ticketing startup redBus.in; Facebook snapped Little Eye Labs, an app performance tools startup; Hitachi's bought payment solutions firm Prizm Payment; GSN acquired bingo game creator Bash Gaming.