Internet and software giant Google will soon acquire startup Meebo Inc. in a bid to widen its social networking capabilities across the Internet.
"We are happy to announce that Meebo has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google!" Meebo said Monday on its official blog.
"For more than seven years we've been helping publishers find deeper relationships with their users and to make their sites more social and engaging. Together with Google, we're super-jazzed to roll up our sleeves and get cracking on even bigger and better ways to help users and website owners alike," the 7-year-old social networking company added.
The two companies are yet to disclose the financial aspects of the deal. However, according to All Things Digital, the acquisition price is said to be around an alleged $100 million.
The acquisition will bring a spate of social networking tools to Google Inc.'s social networking service Google Plus. Launched in 2011, Google Plus currently has around 200 million active users, overtaking Twitter's 140 million members.
The merger with Meebo may help bolster Google Plus' current membership to surpass that of Facebook's 900 million users. The California-based Meebo helps to boost user engagement by connecting publishers and advertisers to Internet users, Business Week said.
"We are always looking for better ways to help users share content and connect with others across the web, just as they do in real life," a Google representative said, according to the publication.
"We look forward to closing the transaction and working with the Meebo team to create more ways for users to engage online," the spokesperson added.
Since its founding in 2005, Meebo has secured around $70 million in venture capital funding and has attracted around half of the Internet population in the U.S. In 2010, the social media platform was awarded recognition for being among the "Hottest Silicon Valley Companies" in the nation.
VentureBeat Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall in March had cited various reasons for the acquisition. Given the company's desire to boost targeting efforts, coupled with Meebo's fairly small but qualified team of 173 people, it may have made sense to Google to cut a deal.
Meebo, which was once valued at an alleged $200 million, had begun cutting costs during the recession. For a company that seemed to make no substantial profits, Meebo managed to raise around $27.5 million in venture capital funding in 2008, bringing it to around $70 million, Marshall added.
