According to a report from Fortune, the deal is said to be worth around $100 million in cash and stock. Previously, Bitstrips had raised $11 million in venture capital funding from the likes of Horizons Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Although no one knows exactly how Snapchat is going to fit Bitstrips into its business, a few possibilities are floating around the Web.
Snapchat has been making a pretty serious push into face-morphing technology of late, so it’s probably a good bet that the Bitstrips acquisition will somehow fit into that push. With Bitstrips’ tech, instead of seeing someone’s face turn into a panda, you could see it turn into a cartoonish version of their face bouncing around the screen.
The news comes shortly after Snapchat reached a pretty big milestone. For the first time, it held the top spot on the U.S. Apple App Store. Sure, it only sat there for around two hours, but its an important achievement nonetheless. Snapchat is usually in the top five or ten apps on the App Store, but before now, it had only ever hit the number two spot.
However, according to a report from TechCrunch, Snapchat has been on the rise since December. Around the beginning of March, it was toggling between the third and fourth spots, and then it eventually reached number two on March 20. It will be interesting to see if over the next few weeks the app is able to get back up to the top spot, or if this was a one time thing.
It’s important to note that we’re talking about the top spot in the States, and the service has reached number one in other countries, particularly those where the App Store is a little less competitive.
