Glip

Glip, Inc. operated as a cloud-based messaging and collaboration company, positioning itself as a platform for team conversations to plan, share, and organize work. The company was founded in 2012 by a team of serial entrepreneurs, Peter Pezaris, Claudio Pinkus, and David Hersh, who had a 20-year history of working together on and successfully exiting several other startups. Pezaris, who served as CEO, had previously founded and sold notable tech companies, including Commissioner.com (an early online fantasy sports platform acquired by CBS), Multiply.com (a social commerce platform acquired by Naspers), and later CodeStream (a developer collaboration tool acquired by New Relic). This extensive background in social networking and real-time messaging shaped Glip's development.

The company's platform was designed to reduce reliance on email by integrating team messaging with essential productivity tools. Its core offering included text and video chat, task management, file sharing with annotation capabilities, and shared calendars, all accessible within a single, real-time conversation stream. Glip targeted a wide range of teams and businesses, counting IBM, CBS Interactive, and Harvard University among its users before its acquisition. The business model focused on providing a freemium service, with a generous free tier complemented by paid plans for advanced features. The platform was available across web, desktop (Windows, Mac), and mobile (iOS, Android) applications.

A significant milestone in the company's history occurred on June 19, 2015, when it was acquired by RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG), a major provider of cloud communication solutions, for a reported $13.5 million in cash and stock. The acquisition was friendly, with the goal of integrating Glip's robust team collaboration features into RingCentral's comprehensive communications suite. Following the acquisition, the entire Glip team, including the founders, joined RingCentral to continue developing the product, which was eventually rebranded and deeply integrated into the RingCentral platform, initially as RingCentral Teams and later as part of RingCentral's main offerings.

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