Google Buys Bump, Maker of Contact Info Exchange App

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By Todd Wasserman2013-09-16 16:58:21 UTC

Google has purchased Bump, a 4-year old company known for its eponymous mobile app, which lets users exchange contact information by bumping their phones.

Bump announced the move on Monday on its official blog. "Our mission at Bump has always been to build the simplest tools for sharing the information you care about with other people and devices," Bump CEO David Leib wrote on the company's blog. "So we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google, a company that shares our belief that the application of computing to difficult problems can fundamentally change the way that we interact with one another and the world."

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but AllThingsD pegs it at between $30 million and $60 million. Bump had raised $20 million venture funding from Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, among others.

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Lieb, working with Andy Huibers and Jake Mintz, created Bump in 2008 at the University of Chicago. The company released its iOS and (later) Android apps in 2009 and later got more than 100 million downloads. Despite the cleverness of the idea, the fact that both parties needed to download Bump for it to work was a road block to truly mass adoption. LinkedIn released its riff on the idea in November 2011 when it released CardMunch. Named after a company LinkedIn acquired, CardMunch lets you take a pic of a business card and store it in a database on your phone. However, there's no way to give your business card to someone else with CardMunch.

It's unclear what Google will do with Bump. Since its owners gave away the app for free, it was never profitable. Bump also released a photo-sharing app called Flock that was similarly unprofitable.

Image: Bump

Topics: bump, Business, Startups