The San Antonio-headquartered Filestack has been acquired by Idera, Inc. for an undisclosed amount Tuesday. Filestack will join Idera’s developer tools business unit, which includes apilayer, Embarcadero, Froala, FusionCharts, LANSA, Sencha, UltraEdit, and Whole Tomato.
A market leader in file upload and management services for developers, Filestack’s file hosting and management service helps app developers manage the flow of user-uploaded online content, such as images, videos, and other files. Filestack was founded in 2012 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduates and acquired in late 2015 by Scaleworks, a San Antonio-based venture equity fund that acquires and operates business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies.
Idera, Inc. is the parent company of a portfolio of brands that offers B2B software including database tools, application development tools, test management tools, and DevOps tools. It is headquartered in Houston, Texas, and has offices in Australia, Austria, and the United Kingdom. Idera is owned by the private equity firms HGGC, Partners Group, and TA Associates.
Filestack’s powerful APIs (short for Application Programming Interface, APIs are gateways that allow software to talk to other software) enable developers to process content at scale. Its off-the-shelf tech stack streamlines the uploading, transforming, and delivery of content within applications and interfaces. Filestack’s low-code platform enables developers to build automated content processing and analysis tools that dramatically accelerate the software development lifecycle.
“The journey of the last 5 years building Filestack has been super exciting, driving true innovation and value to the lives of developers who sought a platform to process visual content at scale,” Filestack CEO Sameer Kamat wrote on his LinkedIn profile. “It is now time for Filestack to fly high under the Idera umbrella of developer tools and platforms.”
Filestack’s infrastructure powers billions of file uploads, transformations, and downloads every month for customers in a wide variety of industries, including ed-tech, e-commerce, crowdsourcing, and printing. Filestack’s focus on ease of use, reliability, and security makes it the preferred file upload partner for developers everywhere and a strong addition to Idera’s developer tools business unit.
“It is no secret that content is the backbone of all applications. Filestack makes the content management process simple and developer-friendly,” Kegan Blumenthal, general manager of Idera’s JavaScript Brands segment, wrote in a statement. “Filestack equips developers with a quick and robust API to enable all types of content upload management in their applications.”
Filestack’s CEO confirmed in his LinkedIn update that he and his team will keep working on TINT, a user-generated content platform Filestack acquired in September 2018 for an undisclosed amount. TINT is a social media marketing platform that connects brands and customers into one social hub. Their social media content display tool helps businesses find and curate user-generated content to drive a high level of engagement with their customers.
“My team and I will be focusing on TINT as we take on the challenge of shaping the Future of Marketing, bringing back trust and authenticity in marketing with user-generated content,” Kamat wrote.
The University of Southern California graduates Tim Sae Koo, Nikhil Aitharaju, and Ryo Chiba launched TINT in early 2013. They took a B2B approach to social media aggregation by using a simple, customizable platform for brands to collect, curate, and display social media feeds from multiple networks for display on any screen, anywhere—on websites and in-store displays, monitors, jumbotrons, and mobile apps.
The self-managed SaaS platform enables marketers to manage social content easily in real-time. Businesses and brands can connect their social network accounts to their websites, in part to help them promote their products and services through their social feeds, but also to provide their websites with more engaging content. TINT is sold as a subscription service and is used by over 5,000 well-known brands including Nestle, Nike, and Marriott.
The problems that TINT solves for marketers are similar problems that Filestack solves for developers —accessing and uploading content, customizing and delivering it, and with the acquisition of TINT, now users can customize how to display content, Filestack CEO Sameer Kamat said.
“We think there’s a big content problem what with user content on an exponential rise,” Kamat said about TINT in 2018. “Images, audio, video, texts—that information has to be captured and curated because it’s useless if you cannot find it.”
TINT has over 130 employees based in San Antonio and distributed remotely across the globe, while there are over 340 employees at Filestack, according to LinkedIn.
The featured image is of a TINT display in use at the NASDAQ. Courtesy image.
The fate of Filestack after its purchase is interesting. I think he will have a lot of growth.