Twitter has made another purchase of a New York-based startup, this time buying password security company Mitro.
The deal was announced by the startup on a blog post Thursday, according to Mashable. Mitro was founded by Adam Hilss in 2012, and is responsible for developing a web browser extension that lets users store and share passwords. The deal will have the company help Twitter improve its work in geolocation.
"We're excited to announce that the Mitro team is joining Twitter's location team in New York, focusing on a variety of geo-related projects!" the company wrote in the post. "As we transition to Twitter, we want to provide you with some updates on our product."
Since its founding, Mitro has received support from Google Ventures and Matrix Partners, and had raised $2.4 million in funding, Mashable reported.
The startup added that it is making its server and client code available on GitHub so that other people can make improvements to it.
The company's password manager has the ability to record the user's username and password as they log into new websites, and it can log the user into sites they've already been on, PC Magazine reported.
The deal allows Mitro to keep operating as it currently does for the "foreseeable future," but it will open source its data. It will also team up with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to develop a "sustainable, community-run project."
"We've been working hard to build a secure, easy-to-use password manager for individuals and groups," the Mitro team wrote. "We've made great progress and we believe that the community can help us accomplish even more."
The EFF shared its approval of the move, acknowledging Mitro's promise to make sure its server runs until at least the end of the year and calling the startup a "mature and usable" system," PC Magazine reported.
"We're very pleased to see this happening, and will be advising the Mitro team on how best to turn their startup's code into a sustainable free/open source software project," the EFF said. "If their code proves to be secure and popular with the community, we will be advising them on how to create a sustainable home for that infrastructure."
Twitter's purchase of Mitro comes only one week after the social networking giant's acquisition of Madbits, a company responsible for building a visual intelligence technology capable of automatically understanding, organizing and collecting important information from images.
