Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud computing unit, last week acquired Cloud9, a software development startup. The terms of the deal remained undisclosed. The move was announced by Cloud9 CEO Ruben Daniels on the startup’s blog.
Founded in 2010, Cloud9 is a “Development as a Service” provider that offers software developers a cloud-based coding environment that allows collaboration. The company, which has offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam, claims to have half a million registered users and has previously raised over $5 million in two rounds of funding.
It’s unclear how much Amazon paid for Cloud9, but the company rarely makes big acquisitions (it spent $795 million in acquisitions in 2015, down from $979 million in 2014). In the first quarter of 2016, it spent $16 million in acquisitions.
Industry analysts say that AWS has been steadily adding essential building blocks of software development to its product line with the goal of becoming a complete platform in the cloud. With the Cloud9 acquisition, Amazon is plugging a critical gap in its service offering by now having a robust development environment.