Microsoft Moves To Acquire Xamarin

Microsoft has finally ended several years of speculations on the Company's desire or not to acquire Xamarin, a company that allows developers to build fully native apps across several platforms from a single shared code base.

Microsoft and Xamarin have worked closely together since a global partnership was announced in 2013 to make it more simple for mobile developers to build native apps on platforms in Visual Studio.

And the announcement for buying Xamarin was made by Microsoft on Thursday.

A possible Xamarin acquisition has been the topic of rumors since the partnership was detailed, though CFO Bryan Morris told TechCrunch last year that the company was eyeing an IPO and that there was “no ‘for sale’ sign here.”

Well now, following a blog postfrom Microsoft’s Cloud and Enterprise Group Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie, it’s official. Full terms of the deal were, however, not disclosed.

“With today’s acquisition announcement we will be taking this work much further to make our world class developer tools and services even better with deeper integration and seamless mobile app dev experiences.” Guthrie wrote.

Guthrie disclosed Xamarin currently has over 15,000 customers, including high profile companies like Alaska Airlines, Coca-Cola Bottling, Thermo Fisher, Honeywell and JetBlue.

This acquisition will allow Microsoft to greatly improve its own set of a developer tools and help spur development of mobile and Universal apps for Windows 10 devices.

“The combination of Xamarin, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services, and Azure provides a complete mobile app dev solution that provides everything you need to develop, test, deliver and instrument mobile apps for every device,” Guthrie said in the post. “We are really excited to see what developers build with it.”

Guthrie said in the post he will be detailing more details about “future plans” regarding Xamarin in his keynote for the sold-out Microsoft Build developer conference later next month.

Xamarin had raised a total of $82 million in funding from investors including Charles River Ventures, Floodgate, Ignition Partners, Insight Venture Partners, and Lead Edge Capital, according to data from CrunchBase.‎