Facebook is reportedly gearing up to acquire India-based start-up Little Eye Labs, which builds mobile app analysis tools for app developers and testers.
Little Eye Labs is based in Bangalore, India and was founded in 2012 by ex-IBM and Apple employees. It is a testing service much like Crashalytics, which Facebook's rival Twitter acquired earlier this year. However, Little Eye Labs primarily aims at gauging the performance of mobile apps before their official release to the public.
If the negotiations, which are reportedly in early stages, comes through, then it will mark Facebook's first acquisition in India. The acquisition is apparently being facilitated by Indian Software Products Industry Roundtable (iSpirt) via its M&A connect program. This program helps assist Indian product companies in finding global buyers.
"We are in preliminary discussions. I cannot share anything beyond this," said Kumar Rangarajan, one of the co-founders of Little Eye Labs, which counts Intel, Qualcomm, Citrix and Capgemini among its customers.
However, per Business Standard's sources, the deal is expected to be "announced in the next few weeks."
For those who are wondering what Little Eye Lab actually does, it is basically a tool that aids Android app developers in analyzing, measuring and optimizing their apps before their public release. The tool helps the developer visualize the app's behavior and approximates the app's power, as well as memory and network data consumption trends.
Smartphone users have an aversion to mobile apps that have poor performance, crash easily and consume a lot of battery power. Per Little Eye Labs' research, nearly 44 percent users end up uninstalling apps that give a terrible performance and 96 percent users give these apps a bad rating.
In addition to analyzing apps' performance, Little Eye Labs also makes recommendations on how one can improve it. Currently, the company has 1,500 users and the numbers are growing steadily, Kumar said.
The interest in Indian start-ups has been growing of late. Reportedly, microblogging site Twitter, Facebook's arch rival, has been eyeing yet another Banagalore-based start-up Frolle, which sifts through over half a billion Twitter posts every month and offers insights on users.
TechCrunch reveals that sources fimiliar with the negotiations "are still exploring ways to make it work."
On the other hand, TechCrunch's sources also revealed that "as of now, there's nothing on the table" so far as Little Eye Labs is concerned and the report of the acquisition of Little Eye Labs by Facebook could be mere speculation. This, despite an acknowledgement of the discussions from co-founder Kumar. Therefore, the news of Twitter's interest in Frolle should be taken with a pinch of salt.
However, an interesting trend is emerging as far as start-ups based in India are concerned. Silicon Valley seems to be having a growing interest in acquiring these start-ups, possibly fueled by an aggressive push from industry experts who have worked in tandem with bigwigs like Google, Microsoft and Facebook for several years.
Recently, we reported Facebook acquired Israel-based Onavo, a mobile analytics company, in a bid to make inroads into other emerging markets. And, with mobile users accounting for most of Facebook's traffic, Little Eye Labs could just be what the social network giant needs to keep itself ahead in the competitive market.
