Confirmed: Twitter Acquires Summize Search Engine

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Michael Arrington

TechCrunch.com
Tuesday, July 15, 2008; 8:00 AM

Update: Full transcript of video interview is here.

It turns out those rumors last week were accurate. Microblogging site Twitter has acquired the Summize search engine, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams confirmed to me. The size of the transaction is not being disclosed, although the transaction price was paid "mostly in stock."

Twitter has also hired 5 of the 6 Summize employees. Founder and CEO Jay Verdy will move on to a new project.

The five Summize employees joining Twitter are all engineers, adding to the twelve engineers that currently work at Twitter. Summize CTO Greg Pass will become Twitter's top tech guy as Director of Engineering and Ops.

The deal has been discussed for some time, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams told me earlier. The companies had a term sheet in place when Twitter partnered with Summize in June to help them keep the Twitter platform stable during the Apple iPhone 3G Steve Jobs keynote. The deal was closed in the last week.

John Borthwick, a partner at Summize investor Betaworks, was also an investor in Pyra Labs (Blogger.com), which Evan Williams co-founded in 1999. In other words, the companies were already kissing cousins.

I spoke with Williams over the weekend at Foo Camp about the transaction and other Twitter issues. The video is below. We'll post a full transcript later today.