| Gnip, Inc. | |
| Foundation: | 2008 |
| Founder: | Jud Valeski and Eric Marcoullier |
| Location: | Boulder, Colorado, United States |
| Area Served: | Worldwide |
| Industry: | Social Media API Aggregation |
| Language: | English |
| Url: | http://www.gnip.com |
Gnip, Inc. was a social media API aggregation company that was purchased by Twitter in 2014. Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, it provided data from dozens of social media websites via a single API. Gnip was among the first social media API aggregation services.
Gnip is known as an early influencer in building the real-time web.[1] The company has also been instrumental in defining relevant web standards: Gnip's co-founder Eric Marcoullier actively advocated for adoption of open web standards, and helped define the new Activity Streams format for web data.
Subsequent to a 2010 data licensing agreement with Twitter Inc, Twitter purchased Gnip in April 2014.[2]
Gnip was founded by Jud Valeski and Eric Marcoullier with an initial investment of $1 million.[3] The company was based on the premise that collecting data from many social APIs simultaneously is tedious and time-consuming. It dubbed itself the "Grand Central Station for the Social Web" shortly after launch. Although the company launched with just a few basic features such as notifications,[4] the product was designed to act as an intermediary to simplify the collection of social media data.[5] The company used the tagline "making data portability suck less."[6]
By the end of 2008, Gnip had raised $3.5 million in Series B funding from investors such as the Foundry Group and First Round Capital.[7] [8] The service was used for projects like collecting huge volumes of data for analyzing Twitter clients.[9]
In 2009, Gnip launched a Push API.[10] In September, Gnip underwent a significant product overhaul accompanied by an internal restructuring of resources.[11]
In 2010, Gnip launched their new and revised social media data collection product[12] and released a manual describing use cases and significance of Twitter Inc's streaming API.[13] Gnip's sources included Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google Buzz, Vimeo, and others.[14]
In April 2014, Gnip was acquired by Twitter for $134.1 million in mostly cash and some stock.[15]