Salesforce has just acquired a challenger to Google Drive and Microsoft’s Office 365.
The sales software company said in an SEC filing on Monday that it paid $582 million for Quip, an upstart online word processing service. Salesforce was previously an investor in the startup through its venture fund, Salesforce Ventures.
Quip, the brainchild of former Facebook chief technology officer and Google engineer Bret Taylor, is a built for mobile, which people are using increasingly for a wide range of work formally done on desktop computers. Launched in 2013, Quip’s cloud-based software let users create documents and work on them together.
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A column that appears next to documents shows all messages and comments made about it. The idea is to make it easier to edit and comment from a mobile phone or tablet.
Quip is free for individual users while small companies pay $12 per user per month. Larger enterprises pay $25 per user per month. Customers include Facebook, Electronic Arts, CNN, and New Relic. Quip has raised $45 million from Benchmark and Greylock.
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In a blog post, Taylor explained that Salesforce and Quip share the same philosophy about software—that it should be cloud-based, social and mobile-focused. As a side note, Taylor also sits on Twitter’s board of directors.
Salesforce has had a busy summer when it comes to acquisitions. The company recently bought e-commerce software company Demandware for $2.8 billion. Salesforce made a bid for LinkedIn earlier this year, but lost the deal to Microsoft. It also bought ExactTarget for $2.5 billion in 2013.
