Twitter acquired the social-data partner Gnip in 2014. The deal was announced in April 2014 and was valued at about $134.1 million, paid mostly in cash with some stock.
Founded in 2008 in Boulder, Colorado, Gnip aggregated data from many social networks through a single API. Its service helped businesses, researchers, and developers collect and analyze large volumes of real-time social-media information.
Twitter already had a data-licensing relationship with Gnip dating back to 2010. Acquiring the company therefore strengthened Twitter’s access to its own data and expanded its ability to sell structured data products to businesses. This is why the deal is sometimes confused with Twitter’s later data and developer-platform changes.
A nearby milestone is that Gnip was later integrated into Twitter’s commercial data business, which became an important part of Twitter’s enterprise strategy before Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter.