Last week it was reported that they were purchasing the E-Commerce app, “Lexity” for an undisclosed amount. AllThingsD apparently found out that the purchase was for between $35 and $40 Million dollars in a cash deal. While the app platform is undoubtedly the main reason they made this purchase, Yahoo is getting a nice little bonus by buying the company. Amit Kumar, the founder and CEO of Lexity, is a former Yahoo technical employee whose job was focused on search and semantic advertising.
He left the company in 2009 to found Lexity which builds apps that help merchants with customer acquisition, retention and monetization. Lexity Live, the main app in the platform, offers a wide range of different types of data about store traffic and other activities of customers.
This acquisition marks the 19th company purchased since Marissa Mayer took over the CEO position about a year ago. The purchases she has made have been quite diverse in both the type of company and the amount paid. While many of them were fairly small start-up companies, she also signed off on a $1 Billion dollar deal to purchase the blogging platform Tumblr.
While these purchases are certainly helping to keep Yahoo in the news, most experts are having trouble seeing what the long term goal of Mayer and Yahoo will be. With such a diverse set of companies being purchased, it is hard to see where the focus of Yahoo will be in the future. At some point Yahoo needs to slow down on purchasing new companies and start focusing on getting all of these new acquisitions working in some coherent manor.
Of course, in addition to purchasing every start-up it can find, Yahoo has also been making a steady stream of changes and improvements to their core properties. It is clear that Yahoo is trying to regain some of its former glory, but whether or not they are taking a smart path toward that goal has yet to be seen.
You can see the announcement that Yahoo is purchasing Lexity HERE, and the story on the price of the acquisition HERE.
