Facebook buys Finland's Pryte


    Facebook has now acquired its second Finnish company in the past few months, this time grabbing Pryte, a Helsinki-based tech company that allows single-click buying of mobile data on a per-app basis. By doing so, telecoms in emerging markets can just provide the exact amount of data for the apps that users want, rather than bundling data in bulk. Bringing the costs down for internet in emerging markets fits into Zuckerberg’s internet.org mission to bring internet to the “next 5 billion people”.

    This past April Facebook acquired Moves, a Helsinki-based fitness and activity tracking app.

    Pryte’s tech is all cloud based and allows for selling of mobile data packages inside or on top of any app’s user flow on a need-to and per-app basis. In this way, Facebook could sell mobile data to their own apps or any other services through its mobile app after partnering with telecoms.

    The acquired company was only founded last year and hasn’t actually started selling its services, but we hear they’ve already built a good network with network operators. Financial details were not disclosed about the acquisition, but it’s safe to say it’s nowhere near the Oculus Rift or Whatsapp range.

    As an announcement, the company writes:

    Today, we are delighted to announce that our team will be joining Facebook. Since we launched Pryte we have worked to reimagine the way mobile data works in an app-driven world, by enabling partnerships between app and content providers, and mobile operators.

    Now, we’re joining Facebook, whose mission to connect the world by partnering with operators to bring people online in a profitable way aligns closely with our team’s goals. We are excited to get started, and make an even greater impact by advancing the work we are doing in collaboration with Facebook’s great team working to further Internet.org’s goal of making affordable internet access available to everyone in the world.

    We want to express appreciation to our investors, who believed in us and in our vision from the early days. Thank you to everyone who has joined us on this journey.

    – Pryte team