字节跳动收购效率工具“幕布”，张一鸣的 To B 野心 – 36Kr
What happened: Cloud-based productivity tool Mubu confirmed that it was fully acquired by Bytedance, media outlet 36Kr reported on Friday. The acquisition occurred in 2018 but was not publicized at the time. The founder of Mubu, Wang Xu, said he will remain on as CEO and continue to manage its operations. Mubu’s parent company was founded in December 2015 and Mubu launched in March 2016. Mubu’s features are similar to that of Google Docs, with some additional features that help users with note-taking.
Why it’s important: Bytedance continues its advance into online documents and productivity tools. Prior to this, Bytedance led a Series B for cloud-based productivity suite Shimo Docs in 2017. The parent company of Douyin and TikTok has also been preparing to launch Lark, a work collaboration app that it has been using internally, to take on popular US productivity platform, Slack. Meanwhile, Tencent and Alibaba have also launched their versions of online document tools. Mubu could potentially help Bytedance further diversify its revenues, which now skews heavily toward advertising.