Square has officially confirmed the acquisition of photo sharing-and-organizing mobile application, Viewfinder. The move is likely to support the company's expansion into selling goods online.
Square, the popular mobile payment company has acquired Viewfinder as it has plans to expand into the online selling business. The San Francisco-based company has mastered the unique mobile payments system of accepting funds through debit and credit cards. Viewfinder will help it to share pictures of goods on sale.
Square and Viewfinder confirmed the deal on their respective websites, revealing how the merger will help both companies work towards a common goal.
"The team is incredibly talented, having built an app that blends beautiful design and highly technical engineering to create personal, human experiences," Square CTO Bob Lee said in the company's engineering blog. "This too is our mantra at Square, and the Viewfinder team's expertise in building simple, elegant mobile applications will help us in our mission to make commerce easy for everyone."
The small team of 10 members at Viewfinder will likely be shifted to Square's New York office, with Co-founders Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis as senior members of the East Coast team.
"We love how Square keeps engineering novel solutions to problems people didn't imagine could be fixed," the Viewfinder team said in a statement. "Their products have already helped millions of local businesses, and the future is more exciting still. We knew Square was the place for us."
As for Viewfinder's future, the startup will no longer release any updates or offer any customer support for its existing users. As for now the photo sharing app will work as normal but Viewfinder says it will release a data export tool so users can download their photos and conversations once the closing date is announced.
