Blue Ocean Of Remittances

TechCrunch: While Facebook moves deeper into using its Messenger platform as a vehicle for people to transfer money to each other, an app built for helping people transfer money is adding more messaging features. Seattle-based mobile remittance app Remitly — which lets people in the U.S. send money to India or the Philippines — has acquired Talio, a picture messaging app co-founded by ex-Amazon engineers with Snapchat-like features to let images and text disappear if you wish.

Talio will continue to run its existing app for the time being, but it sounds like over time certain features will simply be folded into a new Remitly app.

The terms of the deal have not been disclosed but the acquisition includes the hiring of all of Talio’s staff, including founders Piragash Velummylum and Jordan Timmermann, and its technology. It sounds like at least part of the acquisition was made in shares: with the deal, Remitly will gain a number of Talio’s investors, too.

Talio, which originally launched in 2013 as Wire, had raised $2.3 million from Vulcan Capital, Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff, Rud Gadre, Richard Kiphart and others including TechStars. (Remitly has raised $23 million, including a $12.5 million round earlier this year led by DFJ.)

While Remitly and Talio were in different app categories — respectively finance and messaging — they have something in common, besides both being based in Seattle. Both messaging and remittance services are overcrowded with competition, and with the economics of both favoring scale, there’s already been a fair amount of consolidation in both categories. Read the full article

Read also: People sent $1.6B over Venmo in Q2 2015 – more than double this time last year