Google acquires Israeli-American startup to boost content sharing
Published July 14, 2016
(JTA) — Google has acquired an Israeli-American startup that develops products for sharing content among friends and groups.
The startup, Kifi, said in a statement this week that it will be joining the Spaces team at Google “to build solutions focused on improving group sharing, conversation, and content finding.” Spaces is an untraditional messaging app that enables groups to share content, including images, links and videos.
“The mission at Kifi has always been to connect people with knowledge,” the company said in its announcement on the Medium. “We see a lot of alignment to Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Google will shut down Kifi, which will only be available for the next few weeks, the company said.
Founded in 2012 by Israelis Eishay Smith and Dan Blumenfeld in Silicon Valley under the name Forty Two, the company soon changed its name to Kifi, which is an acronym for “keep it find it,” describing an app that enables users to tag anything they find online and share it with ease, Haaretz reported.