Twitter has made its first acquisition under new CEO Parag Agarwal. It has purchased the Slack-like Quill, a productivity platform that lets users message with a team or group. It is believed that Quill will help improve Twitter’s direct-messaging communication.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Quill came out of stealth in February this year and raised around $16 million. Quill will also be shutting down its app soon.
In a message posted on their website, the Quill team said: “We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication. We believe the tools we use to communicate today are not the best they can be. Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal — to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone.
“Quill will be shutting down, but its spirit and ideas will continue on.”
Twitter’s Nick Caldwell, GM for core tech, shared on his feed: “Ludwig (Pettersson, founder of Quill and formerly creative director of Stripe) and his talented team built Quill as a fresher, more deliberate way to communicate. We’re bringing their experience and creativity to Twitter as we work to make messaging tools like DMs a more useful and expressive way people can have conversations on the service.
“We’re thrilled to have them onboard and can’t wait to see what we accomplish together. Welcome to the flock, team!”
Quill users will be able to export their team message history until 1pm PST, Saturday, December 11 (1am UAE time Sunday, December 12), when the company will turn off its servers and delete all data. It is also issuing full refunds for all active Teams.
With Quill’s tech in its arsenal, Twitter could be looking at a major overhaul of its messaging service to better compete with the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and other popular messaging platforms.
Quill is focused on keeping messages organised. The platform’s specially created notification system is designed to keep notifications to a minimum to better the productivity of teams.
