Leximo has been bought by Google!
Okay to elaborate, we pitched Leximo to Google Ventures, which is Google's new Venture Capital Fund. In Google's words:
Google Ventures seeks to discover and grow great companies - we believe in the power of entrepreneurs to do amazing things. We're studying a broad range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, hardware, clean-tech, bio-tech and health care. We invest anywhere from seed to mezzanine stage and embrace the challenge of helping young companies grow from the garage to global relevance.
This is the current statement that will be sent out to the press shortly.
Google Ventures has announced today that it has agreed to acquire Leximo, for people to define and share their languages through a Web experience, for $16.5 million in a stock-for-stock transaction. Following the acquisition, Leximo will operate independently to preserve our successful brand and passionate community.
The acquisition combines one of the newest and fastest growing online language communities with Google's expertise in organizing information and creating new models for advertising on the Internet. As combined companies, we will focus on providing a better, more comprehensive experience for users interested in defining, searching and sharing languages, and will offer new opportunities for contributors to distribute their contributions to reach a vast new audience.
"The Leximo team has built an exciting and powerful platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," according to Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. "Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling search service to users and content owners."
"Our community has played a vital role in changing the way that people consume language, creating a new language culture. By joining forces with Google, we can benefit from their global reach and technology leadership to deliver a more comprehensive language experience for our users and to create new opportunities for our partners" said Ian Balina, CEO and Co-Founder of Leximo. "I'm confident that with this partnership we'll have the flexibility and resources needed to pursue our goal of building the next-generation platform for languages worldwide."
When the acquisition is complete, Leximo will retain its distinct brand identity, strengthening and complementing Google's own fast-growing business. Leximo will continue to be based in Washington, D.C. and all Leximo interns will remain with the company. With Google's technology, industry relationships and global reach, Leximo will continue to build on our success since our launch in late January.
The things Google loves about Leximo is our global relevance, traction and efficiency. Global relevance because we're unifying the world's languages. Google believes we can play a crucial role with their quest for Natural Language Processing in search.
Leximo was launched in January, and we're already receiving over 50,000 visitors a month. March was our best month to date, and we expect more growth to come.
We would like to thank everyone who has supported us from the beginning and the 85,000+ visitors that have been to Leximo so far. We would not be here if it was not for you.
Asad and I will be flying to Google's Headquarter's in Mountain View, California next week. All we can say right now is that it we're ecstatic to work with Google and are looking forward to the great things to come.
