After spending two years as a subsidiary of eBay, web content recommendation service StumbleUpon once again became an investor-backed startup. On Monay, StumbleUpon founders Garrett Camp and Geoff Smith, along with several investors who’ve backed big Internet companies such as Google and Facebook, bought the company back from online auction house eBay.
StumbleUpon
Founded in 2001, StumbleUpon enebles users discover and share great websites. Currently it has more than 7.4 million users. Back in May 2007 eBay purchased StumbleUpon for $75 million. But with time eBay started to believe that Stumbleupon has no synergies with the eBay portfolio and the result is the buy back. eBay has apparently not disclosed the amount.
On the official blog, StumbleUpon stated that this move is not going affect the user experience, though there will be some internal changes:
This change will help StumbleUpon move quickly and stay true to its focus – helping people discover interesting web content. Our goal is to make StumbleUpon the web’s largest recommendation engine and we think this is the best way to get us there.