Twitter buys podcast hosting app Breaker

San Francisco headquartered microblogging site and social media platform Twitter has announced the acquisition of social podcast app, Breaker, for an undisclosed amount. 

Founded in 2016 by  Erik Berlin and Leah Culver, Breaker was a part of the startup accelerator Y Combinator. Geneva based private investment group ACE and Company was an early investor in the platform. 

Michael Montano, vice president of engineering at Twitter, has confirmed the acquisition news. 

Excited to share some news. The @Breaker team, @sferik, @leahculver and @emma_lundin, is joining Twitter.

— Michael Montano (@michaelmontano) January 4, 2021

Post the acquisition, the team at Breaker will join the micro blogging site. 

Leah Culver, chief technology officer at Breaker will be part of Twitter Spaces, an audio-based social networking feature on the website launched for private beta testing in December 2020. 

Other team members, including CEO Berlin and head of design, Emma Lundin, will join Twitter to “..create new experiences for the Twitter community,” said a company blog post written by Berlin.

Berlin further added that the Breaker app which helps podcast listeners discover lists and follow other users, will be shut down on January 15. The platform will allow users to transfer their subscriptions to other podcast discovery platforms including Spotify and Google Podcasts. 

Podcast hosts on the app can transfer their programmes to other service hosts. 

This marks Twitter’s second purchase since December 2020, after it announced the acquisition of social screen sharing and video-chat app Squad. 

In India, Twitter is an investor in Mohalla Tech, which operates local language social media platform ShareChat and short video app, Moj. The company first participated in a $100 million growth round of funding in ShareChat in August 2019, followed by a round of $40 million in September 2020 for growing the short video app Moj after ban on TikTok in India.