Acquisition roundup: Heroku, Etacts, & Movity

Three Y Combinatior startups acquired by Salesforce and Trulia in two weeks

Three Y Combinator companies have enjoyed three healthy exits in the past two weeks, as first pointed out by Xconomy: cloud platform Heroku, email management platform Etacts and geodata aggregator Movity. Salesforce acquired the first two and Trulia, a real estate search startup, bought Movity.

Read a quick rundown of the three deals:

Salesforce announced Dec. 8 that it had acquired Heroku, a cloud application platform for writing Ruby-based applications, for approximately $212 million in cash. Besides Y Combinator, the San Francisco startup was backed by Redpoint Ventures, Ignition Partners, Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal Capital, and several angel investors. Heroku will “continue on unchanged,” according to the company blog, but the company will now have a much greater chance of attracting clients, with Salesforce as a key partner. Prominent Heroku clients already include Best Buy, FlightCaster, the Richard Dawkins Foundation and SCVNGR.



Salesforce announced Wednesday that it had acquired Etacts, an email management platform targeting recruiters, consultants, PR firms, salespeople and just about anyone who has hundreds of emails to sift through every day. Far different from the Heroku acquisition, Etacts is completely shutting down on January 31, 2011, but existing customers can access the service until then. In addition to Y Combinator, Etacts received funding from Ashton Kutcher, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, former Netscape CTO Eric Hahn, Delicious founder Joshua Schachte, CheetahMail founder Irene Pedraza, Powerset founder Barney Pell, angel investor Ron Conway and others.



Real estate search site Trulia announced Tuesday that it had acquired Movity, a stealth startup that aggregates geodata like noise, crime and real estate pricing for home buyers and renters. Movity has a private beta active at the moment, but it hopes to attract tens of millions of users in 2011. The Y combinator company had raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Reddit and Hipmunk co-founder Steve Huffman, PayPal alum Keith Rabois, VentureHacks/AngelList founder Naval Ravikant, and former Googler Aydin Senkut, according to Xconomy. Trulia, which recently hit profitability, is backed by Accel Partners, Deep Fork Capital, Fayez Sarofim and Co., and Sequoia Capital.