Salesforce to Buy Quip for $582 Million

Salesforce.com, Inc. has agreed to buy Quip, a provider of a business productivity software suite for web and mobile that enables people to collaborate on creation and editing of documents and spreadsheets.

The acquisition was announced in a Quip blog attributed to the company’s founders Bret Taylor and Kevin Gibbs.

Under the terms of the merger agreement, upon closing of the acquisition, Salesforce expects to purchase Quip, whose software competes with Microsoft Word and Google Docs, for about $582 million in stock.

This does not include a previous investment by Salesforce Ventures in Quip, according to Salesforce's SEC filing.

Before founding Quip, Taylor was co-creator of Google Maps and CTO of Facebook, and Gibbs led engineering and product at Google.

As part of part of Salesforce, Quip will be able to expand its service and its reach more quickly, Taylor and Gibbs said in their blog. The founders said they are committed to growing and expanding Quip's productivity platform, noting the possibilities of mixing data, content, and communication.