Vancouver’s Summify acquired by Twitter

January 19, 2012

Vancouver’s Summify announced this morning on their blog that they have been acquired by Twitter.

Congrats to Romanian co-founders Mircea Pașoi and Cristian Strat (pictured below). Terms of the transaction are not known at this time.

Our long-term vision at Summify has always been to connect people with the most relevant news for them, in the most time efficient manner. As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.

But don’t worry Summify fans, the current product won’t be shelved anytime soon although they have disabled new account registration and will be removing a number of key features.

Techvibes has been covering Summify since before they were called Summify. Originally known as ReadFu, Pașoi and Strat landed on Canadian shores as part of the January 2010 cohort at now-defunct Bootup Labs. Two months later Techvibes covered the launch of Summify’s javascript technology that gave site visitors a quick contextual summary of outgoing links on a website.

In August 2010 Summify pivoted into a Social News Reader and bought some runway with a seed round from Vancouver superangel Boris Wertz. The new, much improved product focus was enough to get them to March 2011 when they proceeded to raise a significant round from Accel Partners and a number of other investors including Rob Glaser (RealNetworks), Stewart Butterfield (Flickr, Tiny Speck), Steve Olechowski (Google, FeedBurner), and Brent Holliday (CapWest).

Amazing product aside, Pașoi and Strat did a phenomenal job of implanting themselves in the Silicon Valley ecosystem and it’s that hustle and perseverance that has got them to this acquisition milestone. And now the entire Summify team will be moving to the Valley to work out of Twitter HQ.

Slightly ironic because Pașoi and Strat had become poster boys for the Startup Visa Canada movement and had publically dreamed of permanent residency in Canada.

Techvibes included Paşoi and Strat on our Digital Media People to Watch in BC list for 2011. While they were definitely worth watching last year, it will be interesting to see how they can help Twitter address email marketing in 2012.

Update: According to Summify investor Brent Holliday, this may have been an all-stock transaction.