Twitter will acquire social data startup Gnip for an undisclosed price, the companies announced Tuesday.
Boulder, CO-based Gnip collects public social-media activity from sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr and sells it to clients such as marketing and business intelligence firms.
Not many details about the deal have been made public yet. According to a blog post written by Gnip CEO Chris Moody, the deal with San Francisco-based Twitter (NYSE: [[ticker:TWTR]]) will allow Gnip “to go much faster and much deeper.”
“We’ll be able to support a broader set of use cases across a diverse set of users including brands, universities, agencies, and developers big and small. Joining Twitter also provides us access to resources and infrastructure to scale to the next level and offer new products and solutions,” he wrote.
Gnip is one of the standout startups in Colorado, and its tight relationship with Twitter has helped it grow. Gnip was founded in 2008 and began collecting data from Twitter that same year. A breakthrough came in 2010, when Gnip became Twitter’s first commercial data partner, which allowed it to sell access to the complete firehose of publicly available tweets.
“The results have exceeded our wildest expectations,” Moody wrote on the company’s blog. “We have delivered more than 2.3 trillion Tweets to customers in 42 countries who use those Tweets to provide insights to a multitude of industries including business intelligence, marketing, finance, professional services, and public relations.”
Gnip’s investors include the Foundry Group, which is based in Boulder, First Round Capital, and SoftTech VC. The company had raised $6.6 million, with the last round closing in 2010.
