Microsoft Acquires Email Startup Acompli to Give Outlook a Mobile Advantage

Illustration: WIRED

Microsoft has acquired the mobile email startup Acompli, the tech giant announced today on its website.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the tech news site Re/code reports that Microsoft paid over $200 million.

Acompli makes an email client for Android and iOS designed to make common but sometimes complex tasks—such sorting messages, sending typical responses, and finding attachments—much easier to accomplish on mobile devices. But even though it runs on devices from competing companies—Google and Apple—the app seems like a good fit for Microsoft. The product has long been focused on selling software to large companies—Microsoft’s bread and butter—and it already plugs into Microsoft’s primary email server software, Exchange.

Even as companies such as Asana and Slack do their best to make email irrelevant, a growing others are trying to bring email into the 21st century by making it more mobile friendly and helping users automatically sort through the deluge of messages that hit our inboxes every day. This includes not only startups such as Acompli, Baydin, and Dropbox, but also some of the internet’s biggest names.

Google overhauled Gmail with its new tabs interface last year, and it released the even more radical Inbox app in October. IBM is experimenting with new ways to present and organize email. And Acompli gives Microsoft an app that help it compete with these new products, possibly bringing this new email paradigm to the legions of office workers who use Microsoft Outlook.

It’s not clear yet whether Acompli will continue as a stand-alone app or be integrated in Microsoft Outlook, but founder Javier Soltero wrote in a blog post that the app will continue to be available on multiple operating systems. Microsoft has been working hard to bring its products to other mobile operating systems in recent months. In March—shortly after Satya Nadella stepped into the CEO role—the company unveiled Office for iPad, and just last month, it announced a deal to bring Dropbox file sharing to the Office product line.