In first Indian tech buyout, Yahoo! acquires Bookpad for Rs 50 crore

Internet major Yahoo has not yet made an official statement about the acquisition of Bangalore-based startup Bookpad, but the two co-founders of the target company –Aditya Bandi and Niketh Sabbineni – could not resist but throw a party for some close friends last night. “And that’s how the word got out,” says a person closely linked with the development.

After all, how else would young entrepreneurs, both graduates of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Guwahati, react after being Yahoo’s choice for its first technology acquisition in India?

Bookpad, which is understood to have been acquired by Yahoo for Rs 50 crore, provides end-to-end document handling technology for the cloud. The company – which describes itself as “the standard for the cloud format for documents” – designs and builds technologies to solve problems surrounding digital content, with a flagship enterprise product called ‘docspad’.

With offices in California and Bangalore, the company has less than 10 employees, according to its profile on professional networking website LinkedIn.

Founded in 2013, Bookpad’s team has was first incubated at industry body Nasscom’s warehouse in Bangalore, post which it was accelerated at Microsoft Ventures.

“The team was showcased at Nasscom Product Conclave in Oct 2013 where a panel of Rahul Sood, Mukund Mohan, Ravi Narayan, Rajinish Menon from Microsoft Ventures selected the team for their Bangalore Accelerator batch and they were a member of the Nasscom InnoTrek delegation in May 2014 which resulted in a connection into Yahoo!,” Nasscom Product Council Chairman Ravi Gururaj says.

“Bookpad was one of the startup teams who joined the Karnataka government’s information technology ministry at a press conference where we announced a new expanded startup warehouse,” he adds.

Yahoo’s acquisition of Bookpad comes just nine months after social networking major Facebook acquired Bangalore-based startup firm Little Eye Labs. While the sizes of buyouts in the software product startup space are small, this is a testimony of Indian startup ecosystem maturing and catching the eye of global majors, say experts.