In acquisition news, Denmark had a busy weekend after two companies announced acquisition – Libratone, a maker of high-end wireless speakers, and Assemblage, a startup making real-time collaboration apps.
Digging into Libratone first, a Hong Kong based consortium bought out a majority share of the high-end speaker company focused on bright designs and easy linkages to smartphones, tablets, and computers. The acqusition comes fairly quick – Libratone was foudned in 2009 and luanched its first speaker in late 2010. Since then it’s been growing rapidly with over 60% compound annual growth rates with it’s 2014 revenue expected to exceed $20 million in 2014.
The ownership change means that Libratone’s VC investor, SEED Capital was able to exit. The new owners in Libratone plan to “multiply the business” and eventually list the company in Hong Kong. The rumored acquisition price is in the two-digit million euro range.
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And in other news, Assemblage has been acquired by Cicso. We’ve been covering Assemblage’s portfolio of products for some time now, ranging from kollaborate.io (once called CanvasDroppr), an online whiteboarding tool, and presentation.io – a presentation tool spun off of kollaborate.
Assemblage’s acquisition is likely a acqui-hire, given the tone in Hilton Romanski of Cisco’s blog post, where he touts the company’s one-click cloud collaboration but also mentions,
“With this acquisition, Assemblage brings a strong team of engineers with deep web development expertise to Cisco’s Collaboration Technology Group (CTG), enabling Cisco to accelerate innovation and develop simple, easy to use, next generation collaboration solutions. In addition, Assemblage’s experience integrating with third party cloud ecosystem applications like Box and Google shows a close alignment to Cisco’s collaboration strategy and our commitment to simplicity and interoperability.”
