Last night the Helsinki Facebooks and Twitters were abuzz with the news that Flowdock has been acquired by Boulder, Colorado-based Rally Software. Flowdock will continue to stay as an independent product, but will be integrated more closely with AgileZen, Rally’s project management app. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.
If you haven’t seen our past coverage, Flowdock is team collaboration software built with developers in mind. Flowdock pluggs into tools like Pivotal Tracker, GitHub, as well as customer feedback channels like Zendesk. A full list of features can be found here. In November of 2011, Flowdock received $650,000 seed funding from Gil Penchina, CrunchFund, Marten Mickos, and IDG Ventures.
Flowdock should fit snugly into Rally Software’s lineup. Rally provides cloud-based solutions for managing Agile software development. Rally supports 154,000 paid users and more than 1,000 customers, including 36 of the Fortune 100 companies. After this deal, Rally now has a total of 379 employees.
“We’ve been working closely with the Rally Software folks for some time leading up to this announcement. During that time, we’ve got to know a lot of people from Rally and have seen how they work. We’ve found the culture of Rally to be one of openness, active collaboration and deep professionalism,” Flowdock CEO Otto Hilska says on the company blog.
Even though The Economist recently remarked, “Despite all this entrepreneurial energy, the Nordic region still finds it hard to turn start-ups into enduring companies… Too many successful start-ups still choose to sell themselves to foreign (mainly American) multinationals rather than becoming local champions,” it still looks like this is a net positive deal for Finland – Rally is using the acquisition to build a new R&D center in Helsinki.
In the future, Hilska says they will continue to develop Flowdock to make it a must for all kinds of teams.
More info can be found on the Press Release and Flowdock’s blog.
