Salesforce Acquired Quip for $750 Million

Salesforce's Quip Acquisition is getting considered as an alarm to Microsoft.

Salesforce expands it's strength for cloud-based apps and services that it offers to its customers beyond basic CRM. The company has just announced that it is acquiring Quip, the cloud-based word processing app that was co-founded by Bret Taylor, formerly CTO of Facebook. We understand from two sources very close to the deal that the total price is $750 million.

That includes cash and shares, as Salesforce’s 8-K that it just filed on the deal notes “Quip capital stock with an aggregate value of approximately $582 million not including consideration attributable to Salesforce Ventures’ existing investment in Quip.”

Quip was founded in 2012 and had raised $45 million in funding, with other investors (in addition to Marc Benioff and Salesforce Ventures) including Peter Fenton and Benchmark, Greylock, and Yuri Milner. Quip already counts several key companies, including Taylor’s former company Facebook, among its customers.

In a blog post announcing the news, Quip notes that it will continue to operate its business, but now under Salesforce. We understand that Taylor and his co-founder, ex-Googler Kevin Gibbs, will both be staying on post-acquisition.

“We’re inspired by the possibilities ahead of us. As part of Salesforce, we will be able to expand our service more quickly and reach millions of people all over the world — which has been our mission since day one,” they write. “And, we’ll be able to extend the Salesforce Customer Success Platform in powerful new ways with our next-generation productivity capabilities. The possibilities of mixing data, content and communication are amazing.”

It’s not clear why Quip — which was growing and in the enviable position of being very selective about taking funding from VCs — decided to sell up to Salesforce. But it’s an interesting turn in the ongoing consolidation that we’ve seen in the enterprise market, and how that is transforming the bigger companies that are doing the buying.