Telenav Acquires Skobbler For $24M To Power Up An OpenStreetMap Challenge To Google Maps

TechCrunch
Last summer we heard that German startup Skobbler was being courted as an acquisition target, in the wake of Google’s purchase of Waze. Today Skobbler has achieved that exit — albeit not Waze-sized — selling to Telenav, maker of the Scout navigation app, in a deal worth just shy of $24 million.
The acquisition, which closed on January 29, saw Telenav shelling out $19.2 million in cash to buy Skobbler, along with $4.6 million of company common stock — making a price-tag of just under $24 million for the Berlin-based startup that was founded back in 2008.
Skobbler has built a business out of transforming OpenStreetMap (OSM) data into a series of consumer apps — such as the hybrid online/offline maps app, ForeverMaps2 – as well as licensing its mapping engine technology to third parties so they, in turn, can plug OSM data into their apps — as an alternative to paying to use Google Maps (or another proprietary mapping data provider).
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