Canon acquires London-based printing tech startup Kite

Canon Europe seems to be producing a penchant for getting up London-primarily based startups in the photograph or printing area. Following the acquisition of parental photograph-sharing app Lifecake in 2015, the firm is on a browsing spree again, this time buying Kite, a print tech startup that lets builders add on-demand from customers printing capabilities to their applications.

Terms of deal continue being undisclosed, though I recognize that Kite’s founders are being on, along with the relaxation of the 12-man or woman workforce, and that the firm will continue being as an impartial manufacturer inside Canon team.

“Canon are keen to preserve the great entrepreneurial spirit and the founders’ DNA that drove the workforce to establish a earth course firm,” a Canon spokesperson tells me.

Founded in 2013 by Fionn Concannon, Deon Botha, and Charlie Carpenter, with support from Black Ocean, a Luxembourg-primarily based investment team, Kite provides iOS and Android SDKs and a Rest-primarily based API to help builders to add on-demand from customers/personalised print products to their wares. The startup effectively does all of the major lifting essential for print-primarily based e-commerce, in phrases of computer software, a huge variety of products, and nearby printers and fulfilment.

To that stop, Kite is now integrated into around five hundred customer going through applications and internet sites, like customers this sort of as PhotoBox, Polaroid, and Ticketmaster, achieving what it statements to be two hundred million cell customers around the globe.

I’m also explained to that the acquisition is found to healthy into Canon’s mission to make graphic printing obtainable on any unit. Exclusively, the Canon-Kite answer will “help builders, brands and the specialist print business develop new earnings streams via cell-concentrated personalised print”.

Charlie Carpenter, CEO and co-founder of Kite, says in a assertion: “We are fired up to merge our revolutionary technological know-how system with Canon’s electronic companies portfolio to lead a new print period jointly. We are impressed that Canon shares our vision to turn into the internet’s print button, embedded into any imaging app or website”.