Twitter acquires Indian mobile marketing startup ZipDial

Twitter has just acquired an Indian startup ZipDial, a mobile marketing and analytics company based in Bangalore. ZipDial came into prominence in 2013, when it effectively converted missed calls into business, allowing users to call a business and hang up before being charged, and subsequently receiving a follow-up SMS to help drive transactions forward.

Twitter's market director for India and Southeast Asia, Rishi Jaitly, made the announcement via a blog post saying, "On behalf of our India operations, I'm delighted to welcome ZipDial's leadership, employees and a new office in Bangalore to the spirited team that is @TwitterIndia." While no official figure has been mentioned, Techcrunch had earlier reported it to be between US $30 and $40 million. The announcement makes ZipDial Twitter's first Indian acquisition.

In blog post on their website, ZipDial head Valerie Wagoner said, "Our ambitious goal is to make Twitter’s unique, great content accessible to 100% of the world’s mobile users, including those in emerging markets who will be experiencing the mobile Internet for the first time." The service could allow Twitter to utilise the same brand of missed call marketing to reach out to its Indian customers, notorious for their frugality in balance mobile balance and data plan expenditure.