Twitter acqui-hires team from news summary app Brief

Twitter announced Tuesday that it’s ‘acqui-hiring’ the team from the news aggregation app Brief who will now join Twitter’s Experience.org group and work on the social media giant’s new projects such as Spaces and Explore. The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. 

The team consists of 4 members, including Brief co-founder and CEO Nick Hobbs, who previously worked as a Google product manager working on various projects of the search engine giant including Google Assistant, mobile app, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and more.

It also includes co-founder and CTO Andrea Huey, who previously worked as a Google senior software engineer and Microsoft software development engineer before founding Brief. 

It’s worth highlighting that Twitter isn’t acquiring Brief as a whole business, but it’s acqui-hiring its team who worked on the news summary app which will be shut down on July 31st following the deal. 

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“We’re really glad we ended up at Twitter,” Nick Hobbs told TechCrunch. “Andrea and I founded Brief to build news that fostered a healthy discourse, and Twitter’s genuine commitment to improve the public conversation is deeply inspiring.”

“While we can’t discuss specifics on future plans, we’re confident our experience at Brief will help accelerate the many exciting things happening at Twitter today,” he added.

The social media giant Twitter has made many acquisitions and acqui-hires since last year, including social podcasting app Breaker, screen-sharing app Squad, ad-free news reader Scroll and Mobile DSP CrossInstall.

It even offered $4 billion to acquire Clubhouse, $2 billion to acquire TikTok-rival ShareChat and held early talks for a possible combination with TikTok itself. 

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In addition, it has introduced / launched many new services and features including Twitter Blue, Tip Jar, Spaces, Super Follows and disappearing tweets Fleets.

Meanwhile, the company recently announced that Fleets won’t be available on Twitter as of August 3.