Under a new CEO, Twitter’s made an acquisition that speaks to what it might be looking at developing down the line to diversify away further from ad-based, open-ended, consumer chatter. It has acquired Quill, a business-focused messaging service meant to compete against the likes of Slack and keep people, well, more focused.
Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Quill had raised around $16 million from backers that included Sam Altman and Index Ventures and it came out of stealth in February of this year. One of its biggest selling points — apart from being bold enough to speak out about the shortcomings of Slack and to try to build something to compete against its juggernaut-like momentum of growth that has been boosted by it getting acquired by Salesforce — was that it was founded by Ludwig Pettersson, the former creative director of Stripe, who is much admired by many in the startup community.
Quill is not making the cut in the acquisition: it will be winding down as an app, a spokesperson from Twitter said. But the team has: it will be joining Twitter’s Experience org to work on messaging tools, specifically Twitter direct messages.
DMs have long been a source of interest for Twitter observers, and many have wondered when and if Twitter would ever seek to develop them into a more standalone product, and possible business line, especially given the huge boom we’ve seen in messaging apps in recent years, and the moves so many other open-ended social media platforms have made to boost their own direct messaging businesses.
Now, with Twitter making more moves to diversify its business lines, maybe this will be an opportunity to do this?
It’s something of a bittersweet ending for Quill: the company, as I said above, was bold both to make the assertion that business people need collaboration and communication, but not at the cost of distraction, and then to try to make the leap to build and scale a completely new product to address that. But scaling a new entrant in that space would have been tough even without the aggressive presence of a lot of other deep-pocketed, platform-squatting players in the space. Quill assembled a talented and ambitious team, so it will be worth watching what their IP, and that grouping of people, get applied to next.
We’ve asked if Pettersson is joining the flock, too, and will update this post with that and anything else we learn.
