A week after announcing plans to acquire Boulder-based startup Gnip, Twitter confirmed Monday that the deal will lead to the social-media giant’s first official presence in Colorado.
And that presence is expected to grow.
“Gnip’s team will remain in Boulder and, once the deal is closed, serve as the foundation for the first Twitter office in Colorado,” Twitter spokeswoman Rachel Millner told The Denver Post on Monday.
Her comments were the first the San Francisco microblogging company has offered about the deal outside of a blog post released last Tuesday that addressed Twitter’s interest in Gnip, a 6-year-old company that compiles and analyzes social networking data.
Privately held Gnip raised nearly $7 million in funding and employs 85, according to its profile on CrunchBase, a database of tech companies.
“This investment and this commitment to Colorado further starts to create a stronger bind between the core tech centers — New York and San Francisco — and Colorado,” Colorado Technology Association CEO Erik Mitisek said. “And it’s one more block in our story of becoming a most definable tech hub between the coasts.”
In recent years, the Denver-Boulder tech scene has garnered national recognition as a top hub for innovation and entrepreneurship.
Twitter will join the likes of Google and Microsoft’s Bing to operate offices in Boulder. Top tech companies with offices in Denver include Uber, SendGrid and AOL’s MapQuest.
“Our startup community is strong, and I think the big tech transplants have been surprised with our culture,” said Ryan Estes, founder of Denver-based social marketing startup Talklaunch. “But let’s be honest, having Twitter show up in our backyard is a lot like Peyton Manning taking snaps on Saturdays with the Buffs — everyone is watching and we’re all taking notes.”
Twitter, which went public late last year, has a market capitalization of more than $25 billion.
Gnip’s business clients use its database of tweets, Facebook posts and other social data to identify market trends and gauge public sentiment toward their products and services.
“We believe Gnip has only begun to scratch the surface,” Twitter vice president Jana Messerschmidt wrote last week in announcing the deal.
