Beeper, the app that brought iPhone messaging to Android smartphones, has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to support the development of a single service for sending and receiving WhatsApp chats, Signal, LinkedIn and more.
The deal, valued at about $125 million, was announced Tuesday. It comes as regulators in Europe and the United States pressure the biggest tech companies to open up their messaging services to third parties. Regulators believe this will make it easier for people to contact friends and family and switch messaging providers.
Automattic is betting that the changing regulatory environment will make people more interested in finding a unified messaging system like Beeper, said Toni Schneider, Automattic’s interim CEO.
Beeper is Automattic’s second messaging service acquisition. Last year, it bought Texts, an iPhone app that aggregates messages from Instagram, iMessage and more. Mr. Schneider said Beeper and Texts employees would combine their systems into a single app that would work on iPhones and Android smartphones as well as computers.
“Everybody has that problem of saying, ‘I know I had this conversation with this person, but I can’t remember where,'” Mr. Snyder said. “We think we can innovate a lot in this space.”
Eric Migicovsky, who co-founded Beeper in 2020, said Beeper and Texts will offer their combined service this year. The teams that created these companies will meet in two weeks in Portugal to start this process.
“The real thing we were competing against was apathy for new chat experiences,” Mr. Migicovsky said.
Last year, Beeper released an app that offered Android phone users the ability to send encrypted messages and high-resolution videos to iPhones. The app added more than 100,000 users within three days before Apple blocked it by changing its iMessage system.
Although a Justice Department lawsuit accusing Apple of maintaining an iPhone monopoly did not specifically involve Beeper, the problems highlighted by Beeper’s conflict with Apple were mentioned in the complaint, which was filed in March. The department accused Apple of making “iPhone users less secure than they would otherwise be” by “rejecting workarounds” for smartphone messages like those provided by Beeper.
Beeper will soon be open to anyone who wants to download it after a trial period that limited the app to about 100,000 users, Mr. Migicovsky said. The company had 466,000 people on its waiting list. About 60 percent of its users are on Android smartphones.
Automattic was an early investor in Beeper, which had raised $16 million from investors that included Y Combinator and Initialized Capital, Mr. Migicovsky said. Last week, Beeper’s 27 employees officially started working at their new company.
