Facebook acquires Little Eye Labs

Now it's official. Ending months of speculation that Facebook buying Bangalore based mobile analytics company Little Eye Labs, the social networking major announced yesterday that it has acquired the company. The deal size is said to be in the neighborhood of $15 mn (around Rs 90 crore)

A statement on the Little Eye's site said, "This has been a fun and exciting journey. We're eager to be working alongside the incredible team at Facebook, and together, we'll continue on our mission of building awesome analysis tools to aide in the development of brilliant apps. With this acquisition, Little Eye Labs will join forces with Facebook to take its mobile development to the next level! This is Facebook's first acquisition of an Indian company, and we are happy to become part of such an incredible team."

"We're thankful for the opportunity we've had to make an impact in the development of some of the best apps out there" , the statement added.

The entire Little Eye Labs team will move to Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Founded in 2012, the core team at Little Eye comprises of Lakshman Kakkirala, Kumar Rangarajan (CEO), Giridhar Murthy and Satyam Kandula. The company's core focus area is building tools for mobile developers. The company builds mobile app analysis tools for app developers and testers. These tools provide detailed insights about the behavior of the app, enabling easy benchmarking and optimization of resources.

Little Eye was backed by GSF and VenturEast Tenet Fund. The company released its official version of Little Eye for Android in early April 2013 and information available suggests that since then many Android developers and testers have started using Little Eye Labs to measure, analyze, and optimize their app's performance.

While for Facebook it's a small strategic acquisition that will seamlessly sync into its larger mobile play, but for India and its nascent IT product and start-up ecosystem, it's a major fillip. For budding start-ups, this is clearly the proof point that a innovative offering that's relevant to the current tech dynamics will grab global attention.