Twitter Inc. confirmed it has acquired TenXer, a startup run by
one of the card-counting phenoms who inspired the 2008 blackjack
movie "21."
The company on Thursday pointed to a tweet from Jeff Ma,
TenXer's CEO and co-founder who announced the deal on Twitter.
TenXer's technology could help Twitter's engineers work together
more productively, a trouble spot for the company in the past.
VentureBeat earlier reported news of the acquisition. The price
of the deal wasn't disclosed.
Founded in 2011, TenXer provides data-driven management tools
for engineers and their managers to improve their work output. It
has raised $4.7 million in funding from investors that include True
Ventures, Radar Partners and Khosla Ventures.
Twitter in earlier years has had trouble shipping products amid
coordination issues between engineers and product managers. The
company plans to use TenXer's technology to improve productivity
and help managers make more effective decisions through increased
transparency, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Roughly half of Twitter's 3,700 employees world-wide are
engineers. The company currently doesn't have plans to make
TenXer's technology available to outside app developers through its
Fabric platform.
Mr. Ma, a serial entrepreneur who specializes in predictive
analytics, will join Twitter's product team while two TenXer
engineers will join the engineering ranks.
Write to Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com
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