TechCrunch
Little Eye Labs was not the only acquisition Facebook was chasing in India last year. Salorix, a social media analytics startup that had raised $3.5 million in Series A from Inventus Capital Partners and Nexus Venture Partners in November 2011, was approached by Facebook in October last year. But by December, the acquisition talks were stalled.
After several months of negotiations, Salorix investors, its founder and Facebook couldn’t agree on the acquisition price. And finally, few weeks ago, Facebook poached the startup’s founder Santanu Bhattacharya, leaving investors with few staff staring at an uncertain future for Salorix. A Facebook source confirmed Santanu’s new role at the company after looking at internal directory of employees. Madhusudan Therani, the Salorix CTO, also seems to have quit according to his LinkedIn profile that shows his role at the startup under ‘previous’ jobs.
Two back-to-back acquisitions by Facebook in India would have really helped. Currently, Indian ranks quite poor on M&A exit returns, as this iSpirt and Signal Hill analysis noted recently.
Officials at Inventus and Nexus, and even Santanu are not talking about what really led to this fallout. But several people, some of whom are directly familiar with the discussions, said the investors wanted much more than the price initially offered by Facebook.
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