Livefyre acquires social curation startup Storify

Storify will be integrated into StreamHub, which adds social media content to websites

Comment-hosting platform Livefyre has made its first-ever acquisition in its four-year long history, picking up social curation startup Storify.

No financial terms of the deal were disclosed in the announcement on Monday. As per the deal, rather than being shut down, Storify will be intregated into Livefyre's own social curation tool, called StreamHub.

In addition, the entire Storify team will be joining Livefyre in their San Francisco headquarters. Meanwhile, Storify's free product will continue to be offered to customers in the same manner that it was before.

Storify is a curation platform, which allows users to create online narratives out of a compilation of their favorite tweets, videos, and pictures. 

The point of the app, the company says, is to "make the Web tell a story" by providing a platform that allows users to build stories out of tweets and other social media content, adding brief headlines to create context and flow.

Storify is used by nearly one million journalists, agencies and brands, including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, EA Sports, Ford, GE, HBO, IBM, Microsoft, Marc Jacobs, Samsung, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Founded in 2010, the company raised $2 million in financing from Khosla Ventures in February 2011.

Founded in 2009, Livefyre began as a commenting system for websites, much like Disqus. The company has since expanded, introducting its StreamHub product, which allows publications to automatically add social media content to their websites. 

For Storify, being integrated into StreamHub will allow it to move forward and begin providng its services to enterprise customers, Xavier Damman, co-founder and CEO of Storify, wrote in a blog post on Monday.

"By joining Livefyre, we’ll become part of a larger company with more resources, a strong technical infrastructure and experienced enterprise sales team. Storify will be able to give journalists, bloggers, publishers, brands and agencies even more of the features they've been asking for," said Damman.

For Livefyre, the company gets the ability to add new features to its product that Storify offers, including the ability to drag and drop, Jordan Kretchmer, founder and CEO of Livefyre, wrote in a separate blogpost,

"Livefyre’s StreamHub platform powers real-time conversation and social curation for over 400 of the world’s largest brands and publishers. Storify helps over 850,000 marketers and journalists at these same companies tell stories online using social content. So it seemed only natural for us to acquire Storify and integrate drag-and-drop editorial curation capabilities into our StreamHub platform," he said.

There will also be future integrations between Lifefyre and Storify as well, according to Damman, including taking to Storify's VIP product and adding it to Livefyre’s enterprise offerings.

Livefyre is currently the fifth largest network online, with over 400 enterprise customers including AOL, Dow Jones/Wall Street Journal, CBS, Conde Nast, FOX News, Fox Sports, Sports Illustrated, Time. and The New York Times.

The company has raised over $20 million, most recently announcing the closing of a $15 million Series C round of funding led by U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) and included existing investors Greycroft Partners, Cue Ball, HillsVen Group, and ff Venture Capital.

(Image source: https://web.livefyre.com)