Snap Inc, the parent company of popular photo-sharing app Snapchat, has acquired Los Angeles-based small drone manufacturer Ctrl Me Robotics for nearly $1 million.
According to a report in Buzzfeed on Sunday, Snap's interest in drone manufacturers means it has more than just a passing interest in hardware.
For Snap, that calls itself a "camera company", drone industry can be a good place to venture into since drone photography and videography have become popular on social media.
"The deal was something of an 'acquihire', with Ctrl Me founder and drone entrepreneur Simon Saito Nielsen joining Snap, along with some company assets and equipment," the report noted.
Ctrl Me was founded by Nielsen in 2013 to provide aerial footage capture tools to movie studios, using third-party drone and custom-built solutions. The Buzzfeed report states that according to a video posted on YouTube in 2014, Ctrl Me said it was developing products for the movie industry and had plans of diversifying into the oil industry and agriculture.
Ctrl Me Robotics was in the process of winding down when it approached Snap about a possible deal.
In fact, Ctrl Me had, at one point, showcased a drone and an experiment gimbal that could hold a smartphone and let users snapchat from the air.
"Ctrl Me raised a small amount of seed funding from investors in 2014 but the startup never gained traction, and it’s unclear if it ever started developing its own flying robot," the report noted.
This isn’t the first time Snapt has looked at the drone space. Last year, the company met with Lily Robotics, a drone startup that sold $34 million in pre-orders, before it filed for bankruptcy in January.
Previously, Snap introduced "Spectacles" with a built-in camera that brought in relatively little revenue and largely helped as a pre-IPO marketing push.
With inputs from IANS
Image: Perzonseo Webbyra