After raising $1.25 billion the gaming giant Epic Games, which develops the popular game Fortnight, is acquiring Israeli Houseparty, which is currently developing video platform for use in games on social networks. The amount of the acquisition was not disclosed but is estimated at tens of millions of dollars.
The company reported the acquisition in its blog on the Medium site. The purchaser did not mention its plans for the company, other than its intention to leave it as an independent product at this stage.
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Israeli startup Life On Air has raised $52 million in Dec 2016 for its live video chat app Houseparty. The company has raised total of $70 million.
Life on Air founded in 2011 by CEO Ben Rubin, CTO Itai Danino, COO, Roi Tirosh and Head of Product Uri Haramati. Houseparty is a second app for the company which at first, developed a live broadcast system called YEVVO. Later the company abandoned YEVVO and set up Meerkat, a platform for live broadcasts on Twitter. Meerkat was initially considered a great promise. This was until April 2015 when Twitter acquired Periscope, the direct competitor of Meerkat, and completely blocked access to the Israeli application.
Israeli video chat Startup Life On Air raises $52 million for its Houseparty app
This event led to the creation of Houseparty – an app that in its first days offered chat rooms to multi-participant video calls.
At glace, it looks like a success, but at one point the company stopped reporting the number of new users, raising concern that the company was not growing. In the following days the company has closed its development center in Israel, and the remaining team has moved out to the US.
In the past year, the company has tried to adapt its video product to computer games and has acquired by Epic Games.
The investors in the company are Sequoia Capital, previously invested in WhatsApp, Aleph VC, Comcast Ventures and Greylock Partners (83north), the investment arm of Comcast and the CAA agency.
Among the company’s private investors are Gigi Levi Weiss, the brothers Eyal, and Ron Gora, and Chad Hasali, the founder of YouTube.
