Microsoft has acquired Genee, a 2 year old meeting scheduler personal assistant service, for an undisclosed amount. Genee’s cofounders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee ‘plan to join Microsoft’, but it is unclear how big of a team the startup had and if it will migrate to Microsoft. Microsoft will use the acquisition on its Office 365 product suite. According to VentureBeat, Genee had raised $1.45 million from Aspiration Growth, Katrina Garnett, Streamlined Ventures, and UJ Ventures in August last year. For its Q4FY16 financial results, Microsoft said that Office 365 had nearly 10 million subscribers in FY16. In total, it had over 23 million non-enterprise Office 365 subscribers till date and was growing 74% year-on-year. From both enterprise and general consumer segment, Microsoft added more than 50 million monthly active subscriptions from iOS and Android during FY16. Microsoft’s recent acquisitions: - In June, Microsoft acquired professional networking site LinkedIn in an all cash deal valued at $26.2 billion. In 2015, LinkedIn bought online tutorials and training platform Lynda.com for $1.5 billion. - In April, carmaker Daimler AG said that Amazon and Microsoft were in talks with the company to acquire a minority stake in its digital mapping service HERE. The automotive industry consortium had purchased HERE from Nokia for over $3 billion in August last year. - In February, Microsoft acquired the keyboard app SwiftKey for $250 million. Microsoft plans to launch its own Word Flow keyboard for Windows Phones and iOS, but it’s not clear if the company will…
