Customer relations-management giant Salesforce is buying Quip, the San Francisco-based maker of a cloud-based tools for document management and collaborative writing, Salesforce confirmed today. It will pay about $582 million in stock for the purchase, according to a Salesforce SEC filing, though TechCrunch put the purchase price at $750 million. The purchase will make Quip a wholly owned subsidiary.
Quip — in some respects a competitor of Microsoft Word and Google Docs — allows managing active documents, builds chat and commenting into every document and can be used online, on tablets and on iOS and Android phones in 12 different languages, according to its website.
“As part of Salesforce, we will be able to expand our service more quickly and reach millions of people all over the world,” Quip wrote. “Salesforce and Quip share the same philosophy about software: it should be in the cloud, built for the mobile era, and be inherently social.”
Quip co-founder Bret Taylor was CTO of Facebook and co-creator of Google Maps, according to the site. Co-founder Kevin Gibbs led engineering at Google. They founded Quip in 2012, have a team of roughly 40 people and have raised $45 million in two rounds of funding.
