LinkedIn Will Buy Pulse App for $50 to $100 Million

LinkedIn is close to acquiring Pulse, a popular news reading app, for as much as $100 million, according to a new report.

Citing unnamed sources, AllThingsD reported that Pulse had been in acquisition talks with several big companies, including Yahoo and Microsoft, but that LinkedIn won out. The publication has since heard that the deal is set to be for between $50 and $100 million, and talks between the two companies are said to be “nearly complete.”

Though it might sound like an odd pairing at first, LinkedIn has doubled down on content in recent years. The professional social network launched a news hub in early 2011 and has recently been ramping up its own original content by recruiting celebrities and thinkers to blog as part of the LinkedIn Influencers program.

Pulse was founded by two Stanford graduates in 2010 and received a nice boost when Apple’s former CEO Steve Jobs mentioned the app during an Apple event that year. Pulse has raised $9 million to date and currently has more than 20 million users reading 10 million stories per day.

source: Mashable