Andy Rubin’s Essential has acquired CloudMagic, makers of the Newton email app, for an undisclosed sum. The news, first reported this morning, has since been confirmed by TechCrunch.
An Essential spokesperson offered the following admittedly open-ended statement, “We are always on the lookout for companies with great technology and talent to help accelerate our product roadmap.”
What precisely that roadmap looks like is anyone’s guess. CloudMagic shuttered its premium email offering in September, leaving some 40,000 paid subscribers in the lurch. Likely the app will work its way into Essential’s hardware offerings, via the next iteration of its handset, or the currently MIA home hub.
The news comes at the end of a rocky year for Essential. The startup reportedly shipped few handsets in the past year, with rumors persisting surrounding Rubin’s plans to sell the company. In October, Essential laid off around a third of its staff.
That same month, Rubin was the subject of a bombshell New York Times piece about sexual misconduct during his time at Google. The Android co-creator later took to social media to call out the piece’s “numerous inaccuracies” and “wild exaggerations.”
The acquisition could point to a newfound path for the company, which has long denied rumors that it was looking to sell, instead “putting all of [its] efforts towards future, game-changing products, which include mobile and home products.”
