Bangalore startup Little Eye Labs is Facebook's first Indian acquisition

The rumours were right, after all, and it’s now official. India-based startup Little Eye Labs has been acquired by Facebook. The year old company will now be shifting bases – along with its entire team – to Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

The company announced its acquisition in a blog post yesterday. Little Eye Labs pointed at the fact that this happens to be social networking giant's first Indian acquisition in over 10 years of its existence.

Acquired by Facebook

Little Eye Labs was founded a year ago by a bunch of programme analysis fans, Giridhar Murthy, a former Apple employee; Kumar Rangarajan who has worked with IBM and HP; Satyam Kandula, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus and Lakshman Kakkirala, also a former IBM and Yahoo! employee. The aim of the exercise was to help with building better tools for mobile developers. It eventually found backing by GSF and VeturEast Tenet Fund. Android developers and testers can make use of the tools to measure and optimise their apps’ performances.

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The company has announced that even as it makes the transition to Facebook, it wishes to treat its existing customers well and will be offering information on a free version of Little Eye until June 30 this year.

As previously reported, the deal was being struck as part of the M&A connect programme by iSpirt, the organisation that broke out of Nasscom. The firm had launched the programme’s hot-line for product companies to help them be acquired or raise funds. The talks were reportedly conducted in Palo Alto, US, back in May.  Besides Facebook, IBM, Cisco and VMware participated too. The social network, however, emerged the winner here and while the terms are not being disclosed yet, TechCrunch is still sticking to its estimate of $10 million to $15 million being the amount paid for Little Eye Labs.