Waze must be doing something right. Earlier this year, the popular crowdsourced GPS application was reportedly being courted by Apple for a possible buyout. And today comes a rumor that Facebook is also interested in an acquisition.
How interested? Well according to a new report this morning, the deal could be worth in upwards of $1 Billion. Apparently, the two companies have been in negotiations for the last six months, and are now in advanced due diligence…
TechCrunch reports:
“Facebook appears to be close to makinganother billion-dollar acquisition to once again ramp up its mobile efforts: according to three reports in the Israeli press at Calcalist and sister publication Ynet andThe Marker (all in Hebrew), Facebook has approached Waze, the social mapping and traffic app maker, and is now in advanced due dilligence on a deal that Calcalist puts at between $800 million and $1 billion. The negotiations between the social network and crowdsourced mapping app apparently began six months ago.”
Through its own digging, the site corroborates the story. It says that it has received word from an independent source that both sides have privately confirmed that the deal is happening, and that the pricing reported in the two papers is accurate.
Of course, Facebook isn’t commenting on the rumor, but it’s not hard to imagine that it’s true. After all, it’s pretty clear it wants to move further into the platform space. And just imagine what Waze’s data could do for Facebook’s Places initiative.
If the news materializes, this wouldn’t be Facebook’s first major acquisition. The social network giant spent close to $1 Billion on Instagram last year. And more recently, it picked up social aggregator Threadsy and mobile app backend Parse.