Microsoft Buys Acompli Email App for $200 Million

In an effort to spread its presence across every platform available, Microsoft has bought email app startup Acompli. According to a post on Re/code about the acquisition, the price of the buy is somewhere upwards of $200 million.

While Re/code’s report broke the news first, Acompli made it official with a blog post today, in which the company explains that Acompli’s “team and products will become part of Microsoft’s ambitious effort to reimagine productivity for the mobile era.”

The post elaborated:

“…we began conversations with the folks at Microsoft about how we could go farther by integrating the capabilities of their Office 365 platform into our product while continuing to provide amazing support for email and file services from Apple, Dropbox, Google, and Box. Those conversations led to today, where we have decided the opportunity to join forces in pursuit of a better, faster, more powerful email experience is something we can do better as one company.”

For its part, Microsoft had this to say on its new subsidiary:

“This acquisition is part of our company-wide effort to help people accomplish more with their mobile devices. This year we brought Office to the iPad and the iPhone, and we recently announced that we’re bringing Office to Android devices. These are significant steps in our work to deliver the best productivity experiences across mobile platforms, and we’re continuing to push forward.”

In short, this pushes Microsoft forward in its attempts to find its way onto every platform possible, a vision outlined by CEO Satya Nadella when he took the job earlier this year. Acompli will fit into Microsoft’s broader strategy of providing services to users on non-Microsoft platforms – Android and iOS, specifically – and will likely add better functionality when paired with other Microsoft products, like the aforementioned Office 365 and probably Windows Phone.

[Sources: Re/code, Acompli, Microsoft]