Gnip

Gnip was founded by Jud Valeski and Eric Marcoullier with an initial investment of $1 million.^[3] The company was based on the premise that collecting data from many social APIs simultaneously is tedious and time-consuming. It dubbed itself the "Grand Central Station for the Social Web" shortly after launch.^[1] Although the company launched with just a few basic features such as notifications,^[4] the product was designed to act as an intermediary to simplify the collection of social media data.^[5] The company used the tagline "making data portability suck less."^[6]

By the end of 2008, Gnip had raised $3.5 million in Series B funding from investors such as the Foundry Group and First Round Capital.^[7][8] The service was used for projects like collecting huge volumes of data for analyzing Twitter clients.^[9]

In 2009, Gnip launched a Push API.^[10] In September, Gnip underwent a significant product overhaul accompanied by an internal restructuring of resources.^[11]

In 2010, Gnip launched their new and revised social media data collection product^[12] and released a manual describing use cases and significance of Twitter Inc's streaming API.^[13] Gnip's sources included Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Google Buzz, Vimeo, and others.^[14]

In April 2014, Gnip was acquired by Twitter for $134.1 million in mostly cash and some stock.^[15]