Salesforce To Acquire Quip, Adding Productivity, Collaboration Tools To Its Cloud Technology

Salesforce Monday said it has entered into an agreement to acquire Quip, a startup developer of a team-based productivity platform that competes in the same space as Microsoft Word and Google Docs.

The value of the acquisition is about $585 million, not including an existing investment the company has in Quip via Salesforce Ventures.

San Francisco-based Quip, which was founded in 2012 and has raised about $45 million in two rounds of funding, develops a platform that combines communication and content. Documents and spreadsheets created with Quip come with a built-in chat capability that allows teams to collaborate directly without the need for email or other communication tools.

Quip also offers cloud-based technology that allows one-to-one direct messaging chats between team members. Users can add comments, images and other information directly to a document or spreadsheet, and receive notifications about changes.

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Quip provides a variety of management tools as well, including the ability to share documents and spreadsheets; develop task lists; import and export Microsoft Office, Google, Evernote and other documents; maintain edit history; do searches; and more. Those documents and spreadsheets can be encrypted and can be organized in folders and groups with their own permissions.

Salesforce, which unveiled the planned acquisition via a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, said the acquisition is expected to close by the end of its third fiscal quarter, which ends Oct. 31.

Salesforce spokespeople declined to provide any information about its planned acquisition except to confirm the information in the SEC filing.

In a Monday blog post authored by Bret Taylor and Kevin Gibbs, two former Google engineers and the co-founders of Quip, Quip expects that it will more quickly expand its service as a part of Salesforce. The two also said they expect Quip to extend the Salesforce Customer Success Platform with its next-generation productivity capabilities that mix data, content and communications.

"Salesforce and Quip share the same philosophy about software: It should be in the cloud, built for the mobile era, and be inherently social. Salesforce pioneered the shift to enterprise cloud computing—and Quip has been working since 2012 to reimagine a productivity platform for teams that allows them to be more connected, more collaborative and get more work done," Bret and Gibbs wrote.

Quip is the second acquisition unveiled by Salesforce this year. Salesforce on June 1 said it plans to acquire Demandware, a digital commerce company, for $2.8 billion.