Twitter acquires and shutters developer-tracking service tenXer

Twitter has acquired tenXer, a startup that built a web service that’s intended to improve the performance of programmers and show managers what their programmers are up to.

The service will become unavailable to users at the end of the week, with refunds going to paying customers.

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Jeff Ma, tenXer’s founder and chief executive, broke the news to users in an email yesterday.

“Today it is with much excitement that I announce that the tenXer team will be joining Twitter and continuing tenXer’s mission within the walls of its San Francisco office,” Ma wrote in the message. “We are excited about the idea of taking what we’ve learned over the last three years and applying it to a world-class engineering organization.”

Further confirmation of the news has been slow in coming, though. JP Patil, who served as vice president of product marketing and business development at the startup, notes in his LinkedIn profile that tenXer was “acquired by Twitter.” Patil himself left tenXer in February and joined GroundRounds in March, according to the profile.

Meanwhile, the tenXer website itself was still accepting contact information as of publish time for those wishing to give the app a try. But other parts of the website, like the blog, aren’t working. And the startup’s GitHub page has been taken down, too.

After this story was first published, Twitter PR pointed to a tweet from Ma as a confirmation of the acquisition.

Other startups Twitter has acquired in recent years include Crashlytics, Gnip, and Niche.

San Francisco-based tenXer started in 2011. Investors include Founders Fund, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Radar Ventures, True Ventures, the Social + Capital Partnership, and the Webb Investment Network.

The startup’s application takes data from GitHub, JIRA, and Pivotal Tracker to generate charts and reports on activity like commits, pull requests, and comments from everyone on the dev team. Managers could use it to get up to speed on progress before speaking with a given programmer.

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Mobile commerce company Branding Brand used tenXer, according to an October 2013 tenXer press release.

Ma is a seasoned entrepreneur. He sold GolfSpan.com to Demand Media, CircleLending to Virgin, and Citizen Sports to Yahoo, according to a bio on the tenXer site. Ma is represented as a character in the 2003 Jeff Mezrich book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six MIT Students Who Took Vegas for Millions.

Updated at 10:11 a.m. Pacific to add Ma’s tweet as additional confirmation of the news.