Paris-based Kwaga announced today that it has sold Boxcar, the US startup it purchased last year, to ProcessOne, a real-time messaging provider for popular mobile apps, such as Orange’s Libon, BBC Radio, Meetic, Atos & Major League Baseball (MLB). The company’s CEO Mickaël Rémond said that “We’ve been working in messaging for more than 10 years, delivering large scale highly scalable real-time platforms…Expanding the degree of implementation to mobile push notifications is a natural fit.”
While the acquisition is great news for Kwaga, who helped keep Boxcar alive after it had all but shut down 8 months ago, it’s unlikely this was anything more than a bailout – you see, both Kwaga and Boxcar share a common investor, Kima Ventures, and in the end, it was unlikely Kwaga was ever going to be anything more than a vehicle to keep Boxcar alive long enough to package it and sell it.
That being said, Kwaga CEO Philippe Laval took very good care of Boxcar, bringing the service back online and, he said “We’ve been working with Process One for the last 3 months on rebuilding Boxcar notification infrastructure for the benefits of our user base.” The acquisition was an obvious fit, more so for ProcessOne than it ever was for Kwaga and their flagship product Writethat.name, which has been making email easier for me for about 2 years now.
Boxcar will now become a push notification component that iOS and other smartphone developers will be able to implement into their apps easily – a very smart move for Boxcar, ProcessOne, and a great solution for developers, who more and more find themselves banging their heads against the wall with the default functionality that exists for iOS et al.
I’m happy to see that Kwaga found a nice home for Boxcar – they’ve certainly been busy themselves, having rolled out their service on Outlook, in addition to almost every other major email client and CRM.