Groupon Acquires Naveen Co-Founded Campfire Labs

Printer Print Email Email
naveen koorakula, groupon, acquires, campfire labs, IIT madras, B.tech

Santa Clara: California-based social startup Campfire Labs has been acquired by daily deals company Groupon. Campfire had secured a seed fund recently and was operating in stealth mode till now.

Campfire Labs was co-founded by Naveen Koorakula and Sakina Arsiwala. Prior to founding Campfire Labs, Koorakula founded Hypertable, Picch, and Powerset. He was the Search Technologist at Yahoo, the Senior Software Engineer at Inktomi and Software Engineer at Fastforward Networks. He did his Masters in CS from UNC, Chapel Hill and holds a B.Tech in CS from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

The company had aimed to change the way people collaborate online, and the whole team would be joining Groupon, with Koorakula leading Groupon’s social arm. Talking about the acquisition Naveen Koorakula, Founder & CEO, Campfire Labs says, “We are planning to integrate technologies we have developed over the last year and a half into the Groupon experience. We will also be developing further innovative technologies for enhancing Groupon’s social experience. Groupon has been the most effective driver of offline experiences and there is a lot of synergy in our visions for a world filled with more social experiences.”

Julie Mossler, Spokesperson, Groupon says, “Campfire Labs was recently acquired to lead the social arm of Groupon. They are great product technologists who have developed really cool stuff and technology. The Campfire team have already proving to be great assets at Groupon and we have got a few exciting projects in the works for early 2012.”

The company website announces becoming a part of Groupon and would continue to extend the work for creating social experiences for their users. Also, they are discontinuing their product ‘Slice’, which would be migrated into Groupon shortly. The site also thanks its investors, advisors and student founders.