Denver-based startup FullContact announced today that it has acquired Cobook, a Latvia-based company that’s created a popular contact management app for Apple users. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
FullContact is a Techstars grad that’s trying to solve what CEO Bart Lorang calls the world’s contact management problem. The company wants to integrate address books from Microsoft Outlook, Google Contacts, social networks, and even information from real-world business cards into a single online address book.
FullContact says it already manages more than 1 billion contacts and is developing an application programming interface (API), hoping that developers will want to build new programs incorporating its features.
The visions of the two companies have a lot in common. In FullContact’s eyes, “if you’ve got an address book, you’ve got an address book problem.” In the case of Cobook, CEO Kaspars Dancis said his company wants to “make contact management actually enjoyable.”
But they also took different approaches. FullContact’s Address Book is a Web-based product, while Cobook developed apps for Apple’s OS X and iOS platforms. By acquiring and eventually integrating Cobook, FullContact will be able to expand quickly onto mobile devices, Macs, and PCs.
“Users are clamoring for our capability on their desktop, our capability on their iPhone and their iPad, and honestly with a mobile world, it makes a lot of sense to expand our unified address book capability onto the Apple ecosystem. It was a logical next step,” Lorang said.
In addition to Cobook’s apps, the deal brings FullContact about 1 million users spread around the world. Cobook’s six-person team will join FullContact, including Dancis, who will become the product manager for FullContact Address Book.
Their first task will be integrating the two companies and their products. The executives haven’t quite decided how they’ll do that, but a blog post from Dancis said that Cobook’s apps will remain the same in the immediate future.
After that, Lorang said the company will develop apps for other platforms, like Android or Windows—something else users want.
“You don’t care [about the platform], you just want your address book to work, regardless of which service you end up using,” Lorang said.
Following the acquisition, FullContact will have 42 employees. The company has raised $8.5 million from investors.
