Another Portland startup has been acquired. Vizify has been picked by Yahoo! who has, obviously, been making a string of acquihires.
We started Vizify in 2011 with the vision of transforming the information that we all consume and create every day into something more beautiful and personal. We were awed and grateful to see this vision taken up by so many of you as you built and shared our graphical bios, infographic cards, and videos.
Since last summer, we’ve been engaged in a conversation with some of the incredible folks at Yahoo about the ways this more visual approach to data can inspire and entertain. As our conversations progressed, we realized we’d found a partner who shared our passion for user experience, design, and visualizing information. Ultimately, we just couldn’t say no to the opportunity to bring our vision to the hundreds of millions of people who use Yahoo every day.
It’s a bittersweet moment for Portland.
I mean, I really, really like the Vizify crew. And it’s been a true pleasure to be here, observing, throughout their entire journey. I still remember when Todd, still at Monsoon, approached me with “We’ve got this thing we’ve been building. But we’re not ready to talk about it, yet.” To their participation in the first class of Portland Seed Fund. Their wacky little promo piece.
We were very proud that they were the first Portland company to be accepted to a TechStars program. And we were all proud of how they managed to juggle TechStars and PSF and how that translated into their landing capital to realize their vision. But now, a new journey begins.
While this is great news for the team, it carries with it some unfortunate news for the community, as—according to Mike Rogoway—we’ll be losing the crew to the Yahoo! San Francisco office. Doubly unfortunate given that we have a big Yahoo! presence here in Hillsboro. And triply unfortunate, because they’ll be shuttering the Vizify service in favor of focusing on Yahoo! projects.
Sigh. Oh well. Let’s focus on the positive, shall we? Congrats to the Vizify crew! There’s definitely some upside to having more Portland mafia in the Bay Area.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. But for more information, please see Vizify’s post on the acquisition.
P.S. Completely unsubstantiated rumor: I’m sure this happened because Marissa Mayer has been known to run the Portland Marathon from time to time.
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[…] probably caught the news that Portland startup Vizify has been acquired by Yahoo! And as part of that, the team is being relocated to the Bay Area to be part of the Yahoo! office […]
Yay for everyone! Except that I have to come up with a new email signature. Boo for that 😉
Congrats, Jeff! We’ll be looking forward to sleeping on your floor when visiting SF 😉
Way to go, guys! Bittersweet moment for Portland, indeed. Happy to hear you’re headed closer to us in the Valley!
congrats, guys. good luck.
Rick, as always thanks for the love, support, and everything else you’ve done for us over the years!
Yes indeed Jeff. I can confirm that we’ll be heading to SF next month. Definitely bittersweet because we love PDX to death. We’ll do our best to bring a bit of Portland to SF with us.
Any confirmation from the team on moving to SF? Mike reports: “The team of five has joined Yahoo’s media product organization in San Francisco” which isn’t exactly a confirmation of them leaving Portland, rather that the team they are joining is based in SF.