LinkedIn has decided to take another step toward being a platform for news, officially announcing the acquisition of Pulse, the news reader app similar to Flipboard.
The transaction is valued at around $90 million, which is at the high-end of the “somewhere between $50M and $100M” range that we heard when rumors of the acquisition began swirling about a month ago.
With this move, LinkedIn says they want to be “the definitive professional publishing platform where all professionals can publish, discover, and share.”
Pulse’s Ankit Gupta and Akshay Kothari say that Pulse will remain the same, and their team is committed to improving upon their apps.
“With LinkedIn by our side, our team will continue to make Pulse the best it can be. We’re still working together on the product you love, and will continue to provide an innovative and visual news reading experience. For now, the Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.”
LinkedIn’s Deep Nishar explains what the Pulse acquisition means to them:
“We believe LinkedIn can be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs. We believe we can help all professionals make smarter and more informed business decisions leveraging all the great business knowledge flowing through LinkedIn in the form of news, Influencer posts, industry updates, discussions, comments and more,” he says.
“Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision. Pulse’s core value proposition is to help foster informed discussions that spark the decisions shaping the world around us through news and information. This shared view that the power of professional information and knowledge can transform lives and the world makes LinkedIn and Pulse a particularly great fit. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be working side by side with the Pulse team to create new and better ways to help professionals contribute to and leverage this collective body of business knowledge to help them be great at what they do and from wherever they work.”
The first sign of integration comes in the form of a new “LinkedIn Influencer” feed on Pulse.
Pulse was founded back in 2010. Since then, it has amassed 30 million users in over 190 countries. It also boasts content from over 750 publishers.