Last month we heard that Umeng was possibly acquired by Alibaba Group. Today a source told TechNode that Jiang Fan, CEO of Umeng, confirmed the deal to a small group of the team. The price is unknown, but previously it was rumored to be US$ 70 millon while the latest news says it’s US$ 80 millon (see report in Chinese).
Umeng is an alumni of Innovation Works incubation program and just celebrated its third anniversary this month. In 2011 a $10mn funding was introduced from Matrix Partners China. With the Alibaba deal, it becomes the third project Innovation Works exits with trade sales, following DianxinOS and PhotoWander that were acquired by Baidu in 2012 and 2011, respectively.
Alibaba Group moves fast on acquisition this year, mirroring what Jack Ma said earlier this year that his company hadn’t created products as good as what Tencent had and would fill the gap with acquisitions. Xiami, a digital music service, has been merged into Alibaba’s music business unit and is about to launch new features for Taobao. It is reported that Alibaba Group also showed interest in Talking Data, a mobile data service. The unconfirmed rumors also include the acquisition of Moji, a weather app.
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