Google has acquired mobile app prototyping tool Pixate today, both companies have confirmed. Pixate had raised $3.8M from Accel Partners in 2013. It had popped out of the Y-Combinator oven previously (YC S12).
Here’s what the Pixate CEO Paul Colton shared on their blog about the move today:
Today, I am very proud to announce that Pixate has joined Google’s design team.
Pixate was started three years ago with the goal to make designing and prototyping native mobile applications easy and more accessible. Our early adopters helped guide us along the path of making tools and services that best fit the needs of designers struggling to turn their ideas into reality. Today, we have companies of all sizes, from single-person startups to global corporations, using Pixate to bring their app ideas to life.
We don’t want to stop there. Our small team at Pixate has some really big ideas, and with the help of Google we’ll be able to bring those ideas to the design community at scale. We’ve become an essential part of the workflow for tens of thousands of designers, and are excited about expanding our mission at Google to reach millions of product teams worldwide.
Starting today we’re making Pixate Studio free and dramatically reducing the cost of the Pixate cloud service. You can read all about that in our FAQ. I sincerely want to thank all of you for your invaluable feedback and the endlessly inspiring prototypes you’ve created with Pixate. The landscape of design tooling is changing rapidly, and Pixate is committed to staying at the forefront.
According to Google, the team will fit right into what the Design team is doing:
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We’re thrilled to announce that Pixate has joined Google! Pixate adds to our ongoing effort to develop new design and prototyping tools, including Form 1.3. Explore the latest features of both products below, and check out our roundtable conversation with Matias Duarte, VP Design at Google, and the the founders of Pixate and Form.
Google’s evolving design chops have been on display for the past few years, but it seems like people are just now noticing.
We're thrilled to welcome @pixate to @google! http://t.co/SM4La2BeuZ
— Google Design (@GoogleDesign) July 21, 2015
The company had previously launched a few tiers of their service, focusing completely on prototyping, but promising at some point to get into “developer handoff” to improve the workflow from designer to the development team.
Sounds like that’ll come to fruition at Google, as it’s clear that the application won’t be shut down according to their AcqusitionFAQ (TM):
Pixate will continue as a standalone product without any interruption to the service or support.
