Rahul Vohra, CEO of Rapportive, confirmed the acquisition on the company's blog. "In business, partnership is dating — and we went on a lot of dates with LinkedIn. Slowly, but surely, we fell in love," Vohra wrote. Vohra wrote that despite the new ownership, Rapportive will continue building its product. "At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people."
The confirmation comes after a report earlier this month from All Things D pegged the purchase price in the "low teens" of millions of dollars. Vohra did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Rapportive is a sidebar for Gmail that displays information from relevant email contacts’ social media accounts, including LinkedIn, as you open and compose emails. It also lets you add those email contacts as friends on social networks without leaving your inbox.
The startup’s website says its plugin looks up more than 20 million contacts every month — which, considering how many emails can come to one account, doesn’t necessarily give much insight into the size of its user base. It competes with other personal relationship management products such as Smartr and Mingly
Gmail also released a “people widget” in May that had similar features to Rapportive, and the startup responded by integrating the widget into its product. Rappotive responded by integrating with Google's widget.