Linkedin Acquires Refresh.io
Today Refresh.io announced it was going to be acquired by Linkedin. Refresh.io was a “digital briefing book” app that helped you prepare for meetings, by providing a dossier of information gathered from key social networks. Founded in 2012, they have raised $10 million from CRV, Redpoint, Foundation Capital and Haystack.
“We are going to be exploring the different ways we can use the ideas they have into a number of different LinkedIn products,” a spokesperson for LinkedIn said in an interview. “We’re looking to take their smarts and add them to a number of products and come up with a number of insights to make LinkedIn even more valuable.” - techcrunch.com
This is an interesting move as Linkedin continues to expand it’s marketing and sales cloud solutions. Adding in predictive insights across their product lines will continue to strengthen their position as the dominant business network, and ultimately could take on salesforce.com as a next generation CRM player. Where else can you go and find up-to-date profiles of 340 million professionals? And we are not the only ones who think this battle of SaaS titans could happen in the future.
One other interesting point is that Refresh.io will no longer be accepting any new users and shutting down the app as of April 15, 2015. So if you are user of Refresh.io, you are going to have to either move to Connected (which doesn’t have all of the capabilities of Refresh), or consider getting in line for Nudge :).