Beeper, the app that brought iPhone messaging features to Android smartphones, has been acquired by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, to support the development of a single service for sending and receiving chats from on WhatsApp, Signal, LinkedIn and more.
The deal, valued at about $125 million, was announced Tuesday. It comes as regulators in Europe and the United States are forcing the biggest tech companies to open up their messaging services to third parties. Regulators believe doing so will make it easier for people to contact friends and family and switch messaging providers.
Automattic is betting that the changing regulatory environment will make people more interested in finding a unified messaging system like Beeper, said Toni Schneider, Automattic’s interim chief executive.
Beeper is Automattic’s second messaging service acquisition. Last year, it bought Texts, an iPhone app that aggregates messages from Instagram, iMessage and others. Mr. Schneider said Beeper and Texts employees will integrate their systems into an app that works on iPhone and Android smartphones as well as computers.
“Everybody has this problem where they say, ‘I know I talked to this person, but I can’t remember where,'” Mr. Schneider said. “We think we can innovate a lot in this space.”
Eric Migicovsky, who co-founded Beeper in 2020, said that Beeper and Texts will deliver their combined service this year. The teams that built those companies will meet in two weeks in Portugal to start that process.
“The real thing we’re competing against is apathy about new chat experiences,” Mr. Migicovsky said.
Last year, Beeper released an app that offered Android phone users the ability to send encrypted messages and high-resolution videos to iPhones. The app added more than 100,000 users in three days before Apple blocked it by changing its iMessage system.
Although a Justice Department lawsuit accusing Apple of maintaining an iPhone monopoly does not specifically refer to Beeper, the problems highlighted by Beeper’s conflict with Apple are mentioned in the complaint, which was filed in March. The department accused Apple of making “iPhone users less safe than they otherwise would be” by “denying solutions” for smartphone messaging like those provided by Beeper.
Beeper will soon be open to anyone who wants to download it after a trial period that limited the app to about 100,000 users, Mr. Migicovsky said. The company has 466,000 people on its waiting list. About 60 percent of its users are on Android smartphones.
Automattic was an early investor in Beeper, having raised $16 million from investors that included Y Combinator and Initialized Capital, Mr. Migicovsky said. Last week, 27 Beeper employees officially started working at their new company.
