The Tallinn-based Estonian startup, Teleport, has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by MOVE Guides, a company that moves and manages mobile workforce.
Teleport was founded in April 2014 by early Skype employees Sten Tamkivi and Silver Keskküla while Tamkivi was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, a private American venture capital firm. The company’s core product – Teleport Cities – uses data science and matching algorithms to help knowledge workers discover their best places to live and work. Teleport Cities provides income, cost and quality of life data from 260 cities around the world, and served over a million searches by its 250,000 users in 2016.
MOVE Guides is a San Francisco-based company that helps HR teams move their employees around the world. The company partners with leading multinational entities to deliver a full global mobility program across 200 countries and territories. According to the company, it grows more than 200% annually. Industry leaders, including Société Générale, Morningstar and King.com rely on MOVE Guides for their global mobility management requirements, the company said in a statement.
Global mobility through software and data science
“We founded Teleport with the vision of helping free people move, by giving mobile millennials access to modern software tools to smoothly get to wherever they need to be to make most of their potential,” Teleport CEO and co-founder, Sten Tamkivi, said. “I am convinced that now part of MOVE Guides, working together for major customers moving employees of all types every year, we will get to that empowering future much faster.”
MOVE Guides CEO and founder, Brynne Kennedy, said his company and Teleport had a “shared vision to democratise global mobility through software and data science”.
With the acquisition of Teleport, MOVE Guides adds its Tallinn office to its global presence, across the San Francisco, London and Hong Kong, and accelerates growth of its European technology hub.
The company also said Tamkivi and Keskküla will join its leadership team, and the Teleport Cities product will remain live for consumers under the brand Teleport, a MOVE Guides company.
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Cover: Healthcare affordability around the world, according to data map by Teleport.
I’m skeptical this was much of a “win” for Teleport investors. Teleport wasn’t making any money, so the only thing to do was to be acquired. MoveOn probably didn’t pay much. While Teleport has some strategic value, it’s still a money-losing company with no long-term positive cashflow prospects.