Why Facebook bought Indian startup Little Eye Labs

Facebook has made its first India-based acquisition with Little Eye Labs, a startup that builds performance analysis and monitoring tools for mobile Android apps. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but media reports suggest the price was less than $15 million. The Bangalore based start up company, Little Eye Labs, was co- founded by a group of experts who call themselves “ions” (short for “eye-ons”). The CEO of the company (also known as the chief ion) Kumar Rangarajan founded Little Eye Labs along with his friends in 2012. Rangarajan wanted to build a world class product company focused on solving problems for a new generation of mobile app developers. As part of the Facebook acquisition, Little Eye Labs will relocate to Menlo Park, California, the home of Facebook’s headquarters. “From there, we’ll be able to leverage Facebook’s world-class infrastructure and help improve performance of their already awesome apps. For us, this is an opportunity to make an impact on the more than 1 billion people who use Facebook,” the startup wrote on its site. So, why did Facebook acquire Little Eye Labs? Most important reason: mobile development. With the Indian startup, Facebook plans to help boost its technology as it focuses on growing revenue from its mobile business. A Times Of India report notes that the deal helps Facebook in its push towards the mobile environment, and at a really cheap price. “The Little Eye Labs technology will help us to continue improving our Android codebase to make more efficient, higher-performing apps,” Subbu Subramanian, Facebook’s engineering manager said. An investor in Little Eye told ToI that the American company was striking a really good bargain and that such a package would have cost much more anywhere else in the world. The core business of Little Eye Labs evolves around developing performance analysis and monitoring tools for Android developers, notes a ZDnet report. This includes tracking and monitoring how apps and processes consume handset resources such as power, memory, storage; the impact of processes and active hardware like GPS and Wi-Fi; and events and logs at the application and system level. But the deal is not just beneficial for Facebook– it may be a whole new start for the startup community in India.