Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Family network app Life360 is expanding its reach with the acquisition of Couple, an app designed for keeping busy couples connected throughout the day.
The acquisition makes sense considering that Couple does more or less the same thing as the Life360 app, only the former is designed for two, whereas the latter can be used by the whole family. In both cases, the apps serve to keep couples and family members connected, allowing private messages, photos and stickers to be sent, and locations to be shared.
Itamar Novick, Chief Business Officer of Life360, explained that the marriage between Life360 and Couple was a natural one considering how they both share a mission to keep people connected with their loved ones.
“This acquisition represents a strategic alignment of our audiences as couples make up a significant percentage of our user base at Life360,” Novick said.
Couple, which was launched in 2012, has been downloaded millions of times on both the iPhone and Android platforms, helping couples send more than four billion messages to each other, the company said. There are no immediate plans to integrate Couple with Life360, and so for now the apps will continue to operate as they have done. However, Novick explained that developers will now work to build a migration path into Couple to Life360, which means couples who wish to create a larger network including their children can. As such, Oleg Kostour, co-founder and CEO of Couple, Jake Schwartz, Lead Engineer, and Andrew Jasso, Lead Designer, have joined the Life360 team and will continue to support and further develop the Couple app from Life360's offices in San Francisco.
"Life360 is a perfect fit for Couple because of their tremendous expertise in the family space, and their focus on users with high-trust relationships,” said Kostour. “We are excited to join the talented team at Life360 and are excited about the future for Couple."
Couple was famously incubated at Y-Combinator and has the backing of SV Angel, CrunchFund, Ashton Kutcher's A-Grade Investments, Dave Morin, Yuri Milner, Founder Collective, Lerer Ventures, Betaworks, Michael Birch, Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Gary Vaynerchuk and other strategic angel investors.
