SAN FRANCISCO, July 23 — LinkedIn Corp., owner of the largest professional-networking website, agreed to buy business-marketing startup Bizo Inc. for about US$175 million (RM555.8 million).
LinkedIn will pay 10 per cent of the purchase price in stock and the rest in cash, the Mountain View, California-based company said yesterday in a statement. The acquisition of San Francisco-based Bizo, which was founded in 2008, is expected to close in the third quarter.
Bizo, already a LinkedIn partner, makes tools that help salespeople and marketers decide whom to target for their pitches. LinkedIn has been expanding into services beyond job recruiting and could integrate Bizo’s technology into the content marketing it is already doing, according to Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s senior vice president of product and user experience.
“It’s exciting for us to bring Bizo’s expertise and technology into our ecosystem,” Nishar said in the statement.
As of June 2013, Bizo had raised almost US$30 million in venture funding. The startup reported US$12.4 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the company’s blog, with US$38.3 million in bookings last year. — Bloomberg
