Square Acquires Viewfinder to Help Grow Its Engineering Team

Square has acquired Viewfinder, a photo-sharing and group messaging app, the two companies announced Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed.
Viewfinder launched on iOS earlier this year with the goal of building intimate conversations around photos that might otherwise only exist in one's smartphone camera roll. The app organized photos by date and place based on the photos' metadata, not unlike the way Apple organized photos with its update for iOS 7. Users could then start or join conversations attached to these photos.
While the app received some press coverage, it only cracked the top 100 iPhone apps in one country (Greece) according to data from App Annie. In September, the team started to prep a major update that would prompt users to share "important moments" in general.
Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise then thatSquare's announcement focused less on the app than the team behind it, which includes former engineers from Google. Viewfinder's team will be tasked with working on "seller initiatives" and helping to grow Square's New York presence and triple its engineering team in the next year.
"On a personal note, I couldn’t be more excited to work again with Spencer, Peter, Ben, et al.," Bob Lee, Square's CTO, wrote in the blog post. "We crossed paths again at Google where they kindled the Google NYC engineering office and spearheaded key infrastructure."
The Viewfinder app isn't being shut down, but it's not being supported either. "Existing users will still be able to use the Viewfinder app for the time being, although we will no longer be releasing updates or providing customer support," the Viewfinder team wrote in a separate blog post.
The acquisition is Square's third to date. The mobile payments company bought a small video production group in 2011 and a New York design firm called 80/20 last October.