Yahoo made its first acquisition under new CEO Marissa Mayer Thursday, buying New York-based mobile recommendation app Stamped. The deal, first reported by Mashable, will be a talent acquisition of about 10 employees with Stamped’s mobile and web discontinued by the end of the year.
Mayer confirmed the acquisition with an Instagram picture (no Flickr love?) with members of the Stamped team. The deal would reunite Mayer with Stamped CEO Robby Stein, who used to work for Mayer at Google as a product manager.
Mayer has talked about becoming more of a mobile company but also said the Yahoo would be making smaller acquisitions. This deal, the details of which we’re still trying to nail down, would satisfy both goals unlike a big acquisition like Foursquare. Stamped’s team will now form the basis of a Yahoo mobile product and engineering office based in New York.
Stamped began life as a recommendation app that allowed people to stamp the things they like, such as restaurants, movies, TV shows and books. It took on $ 3 million in funding including $ 1.5 million a few months ago from a bunch of celebrities including Justin Bieber, Ryan Seacrest and Ellen Degeneres.
Stamped released a statement explaining that Stamped users will soon get a tool to export their stamps. In the future, Stamped will be working on more mobile tools for Yahoo and will be hiring a lot of engineers.
“As for our team’s next step, we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Yahoo!. As a team of mostly former Googlers, we’ve all worked with and are big fans of Marissa. So when an opportunity arose to become a part of the team at Yahoo!, we jumped. As entrepreneurs, it’s never easy to walk away from something you built from the ground up, but the folks we met with at Yahoo! are simply top-notch and we’re thrilled to be joining them!”
The buy is another sign of Silicon Valley companies buying up New York talent and extending their reach into the city. Square recently bought design firm 80/20 and eBay bought Hunch.
