On Friday, Salesforce announced that it has acquired software company Unity&Variety to further enhance the design standards of its word processing company Quip. The financial details of the transaction haven’t been disclosed by either party.
Headquartered in San Francisco, Unity&Variety was founded by former Facebookers Drew Hamlin, Joey Flynn, along with Andy Chung in 2015. Their software company has only released one product till date, that too an iOS game called Pinchworm. The game had amassed good feedback from users but the team started work on building a productivity tool — instead of another silly but fun game. They haven’t raised any funds since their inception.
Speaking on the acquisition of their company, the co-founders have posted a short and sweet message on their website. The same reads as under:
Here at Unity&Variety we’ve been cranking on some new productivity tools. We’re hyped to announce that starting today we’ll be continuing our work with our talented friends over at Quip, a Salesforce company.
This acquisition will see the aforementioned founding members join the Quip team and work on the productivity tool they were building. It has been told to TechCrunch by Quip CEO Bret Taylor that Unity&Variety were working on a compelling tool. Thus, they’ve now bought the IP as well as the team behind the same.
This is also a reunion-of-sorts for the co-founders of the two startups now operating under Salesforce. Taylor states that his past experience working with them on a variety of products influenced his decision for the acquisition of their startup. At Facebook, Flynn and Hamlin are said to have worked on developing the core experiences of Facebook Home, News Feed, and other products across different verticals. They are also credited on building the standalone Snapchat competitor ‘Slingshot,’ which unfortunately didn’t gain much traction.
Talking about the same, Taylor shares his thoughts on the said acquisition via a Facebook post:
Kevin and I are beyond excited to announce that the incredible design team at Unity&Variety is joining Quip to help us build the next generation of productivity tools.
I am psyched to have the opportunity to work with Joey and Drew again. Some of the best product designers I have ever worked with. I can’t wait to see how they transform Quip.
As for those thinking, where does Unity&Variety’s design team fit into all of this? Well, Quip, acquired by Salesforce for $582 million, is a productivity tool that combines the power of creating minimalistic word and excel documents in one window. It enables team members to seamlessly collaborate on projects and the items are displayed in a News-Feed style interface. This is where the Unity&Variety team can help the company improve and introduce add-on features.
