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").

[caption id="attachment_1328617" align="alignright" width="380"] Screengrab from the Little Eye Labs website.[/caption]

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.

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"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 startupwrote 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.