New York-based startup Unroll.Me, which helps people unsubscribe from unwanted e-mails, said Monday it was acquired by Slice, a Palo Alto-based developer of an e-commerce and package tracking app. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Unroll.Me, founded in 2011 by Jojo Hedaya and Josh Rosenwald, is a service that lets people see all the automated e-mails they are subscribed to, then choose which ones they want to stop receiving. It also lets them set up a daily digest of the e-mails they do wish to see.
Slice’s app organizes shopping data from users’ electronic receipts in their e-mail inboxes, collecting data on each purchase, and can track the shipping progress of ordered items. In September, Japan’s Rakuten acquired Slice with ambitions to build new technology for e-commerce.
Unroll.Me CEO Rosenwald says his company, which had been bootstrapped and backed by a friends-and-family investment round, developed to a point where future growth meant deep changes. “It just wasn’t going to be feasible to go it alone,” he says.
The startup’s options were to either seek substantial funding or find a larger partner, he says. That led to talks with Slice.
There are no plans to shakeup Unroll.Me, Rosenwald says, with the headquarters to remain in New York. He expects to ramp up the staff of seven in short order, though. “We’re looking to double that within the next six months,” he says. There might be some technology integration in the future with Slice, Rosenwald says, but it is too early to specify what.
For Rosenwald, Unroll.Me is the latest go at building a startup. His prior startup, Sportce, was founded in 2010 with plans to sell sports league video footage as alternatives to banner ads on sports blogs. Procuring licensed video content was too expensive, though, and Sportce shut down in spring 2011, giving Rosenwald time to focus on Unroll.Me.
