Urban Airship has acquired Tello, a company that streamlines the creation and management of passes for Apple’s Passbook for an undisclosed amount. Urban Airship, which has raised $21.6m in funding, is backed by telecommunications conglomerate Verizon, enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com, Intel Capital, the corporate venturing unit of the semiconductor company and venture firms Foundry Group and True Ventures .
Launched in 2010, Tello has raised $3.7m, with $1m raised in seed funding in 2010 and $2.7m in a Series A earlier this month, from backers: 500 Startups, Bullpen Capital, Founder Collective, Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Russ Siegelman, Marc Goines, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, and Shervin Pishevar.
Urban Airship and Tello share a common investor: True Ventures.
Chief Executive of Urban Airship, Scott Kveton, said: “ We are really excited about the idea of being able to work with companies outside of the need for having an app, we think there are a lot of companies where a pass may end up being a better solution for them than an app. Being able to work with those companies and develop a really effective mobile program … is really significant for our business.”
Urban recently acquired SimpleGeo, a real-time services platform developer for a figure reported by new provider VentureBeat to be about $3m.