Uber acqui-hires a social app to work on driver experience within the driver earnings team

Uber has acqui-hired a social app Swipe Labs. According to a report by TechCrunch the hired engineers will work with Uber on improving the driver experience within the driver earnings team.The value of the deal has not been disclosed but is expected to be much less than $56 million, as offered to the startup in previous bids by other companies. Swipe Lab has raised $8.2 million in past four years and built four apps for sharing photos, videos and group texts.According to the report the founders of the startup Marwan Roushdy and Addison Hardy had also started a furniture rental startup Fonzy which couldn't gain support from the users and flopped. They also tried to build another app called Tag for privately sharing photos with a group of friends, but that too couldn't succeed in gaining a profit in the market.Finally, taking ideas from their past experiences, they built Swipe which got more than a million users within a few weeks. The initial exposure got them s $5.6 million valuation but it could not gain much popularity because of Snapchat. The Co-founder Addison Hardy left the company and the company has been struggling since then.Uber Technologies Inc's shareholders and its board on 15 July discussed selling some of their stock to Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group Corp and other investors. The report suggested the expected money from the deal could be invested in a startup. The details of the deal were not disclosed by the company.