Dropbox has acquired startup Clementine Labs, which developed an app that employees could use to make voice calls and exchange messages with one another. The startup posted the news on its blog this morning.
“The Clementine service … will be shutting down,” the team wrote in the blog post. “The free portions of the app will remain active for current users until August 31, 2015 and we’ll provide plenty of help to regular and premium subscribers as the service transitions.”
Rather than take on fast-growing team communication app Slack, Clementine appears to be more on par with Google Hangouts. It provided telephone conferencing and other features in iOS and Android apps through which one could get a business number to make unlimited calls and texts for $9.99 per month.
Dropbox could use the additional functionality to become at least as useful as other cloud-based file-sharing apps with which it competes, including Box and Google Drive. Other recent Dropbox acquisitions include voiceover startup Umano.
San Francisco-based Clementine Labs started in 2013 and launched its app last year.
“Our product targets the $10B/yr Enterprise Telephony space that’s *aching* to be disrupted by the right MobileFirst service,” the team wrote on its AngelList page.
Investors include Homebrew, Redpoint Ventures, Roy Sehgal, John Robb, and Ariel Seidman.
Cofounder and chief executive Vinod Valloppillil was previously an entrepreneur in residence at Redpoint, where he came up with the idea for Clementine.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
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