The terms of the deal were not announced, but Mashery raised $35 million from investors, including a $10 million round last year and was valued at $60 million, reports Owen Thomas at ReadWrite.
If Mashery sold for two to three times its valuation, as is typical, that would have put the sale at $120 million to $180 million, Thomas speculates.
Here's one of the tweets that confirms the sale.
@cisco_mobile our API delivery network supports 62K active apps built by over 200K devs. With @intel we’ll be able to move even faster.
— Mashery (@Mashery) April 17, 2013
This isn't a shocking buy for Intel. Since late last year, Intel was already selling Mashery's tool under its own brand name, the Intel Expressway API Manager.
Mashery does something called "application programming interface management" and this is an increasingly hot area thanks to mobile, social and
Mashery competes with other startups like Apigee and 3Scale. But the area is so hot, newcommers are ready to enter, too, like MuleSoft, cofounder Ross Mason told Business Insider.
Whatever the price, it's a nice exit for Mashery's cofounder and CEO Oren Michels, who hails from Feedster, along with cofounder, Kirsten Spoljaric, also from Feedster. (Another cofounder from Feedster, Clay Loveless, who was Mashery's Chief Architect left in 2010.)
Feedster was a hot blog search engine in the mid-2000's that still exists today but has withered away. Like Technorati, it's name is often thrown around as an example of what not to do.
Michels is known as one of Uber's Angel investors and an advisor to other Valley startups.