Twitter Acquires Sphere Chat App From Nick D’Aloisio

Twitter is expanding its presence in the social media world and has acquired a chatting app created by British serial entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio.

Twitter Acquires Sphere

Social media giant Twitter has acquired a chat app called Sphere. The chat application was developed and co-founded by British serial entrepreneur Nick D’Aloisio.

In a blog post a few hours ago, the company said, “We’re excited to share some big news today — Sphere has been acquired by Twitter! We’ve joined to accelerate our mission of bringing people closer together through community.”

Sphere has been around for the past five years after it was created in 2016. In the beginning, Sphere was designed to be a real-time question and answer app that also has some micropayments features. However, the app has evolved over the years to become a group chat app.

Sphere experienced huge growth during its first few years, raising over $30 million between 2017 and 2019 from investors such as Index Ventures, Tinder co-founder Sean Rad, Airbnb co-founder Brian Chesky and Sequoia venture capitalist Mike Moritz.

In an interview with CNBC, D’Aloisio said it is important that a startup grows to a level where it can partner with the right companies that share similar values and ideas. He added that the initial version of the app had more than 500,000 users. However, he didn’t disclose how many users the app currently has.

Per the terms of the acquisition, 20 Sphere employees will join Twitter. However, the financial details of the acquisition are yet to be made public.

TWTR Down BY Less Than 1%

The news of the acquisition didn’t help push Twitter’s stock price higher. TWTR is down by 0.08% so far today and is trading at $65.61 per share. Twitter’s stock has underperformed over the past three months, similar to the broader tech sector.

However, TWTR is still up by more than 20% since the start of the year, outperforming some of the other tech stocks.