By Jeff Perlah - Google-owned Nest said on Friday that has acquired San Francisco-based Dropcam, makers of home monitoring cameras, the Verge reports. Nest itself was acquired by Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) in a $3.2 billion deal announced in January, and continues to be independently operated.
Dropcam's price was $555 million, according to Recode. Privately, the company had raised $47.8 million, with the bulk of it from a $30 million round last July that was led by Institutional Venture Partners.
Matt Rogers, Nest founder and head of engineering, said in a blog post that Nest will be taking over customer support for Dropcam products, and "incorporate Dropcam into how we do business at Nest." The blog also said that "Dropcam will come under Nest’s privacy policy, which explains that data won’t be shared with anyone [including Google] without a customer’s permission. Nest has a paid-for business model and ads are not part of our strategy. In acquiring Dropcam, we’ll apply that same policy to Dropcam too." And Rogers added that "Many of you already own Dropcam products and have asked if we could make them work with Nest. Today, we're one step closer to making that happen."
Nest's business has been to sell smoke detectors and thermostats that are paid for up front, but bringing on Dropcam brings a new dimension to its game plan considering Dropcam's way of operating has centered on selling customers a camera, then a cloud recording service, which can record up to a month of video stored online and can be played back via browser or mobile apps.