Google confirms it has closed the deal for the acquisition of Waze
Google has won the Waze battle, buying the Israeli start-up for a rumoured £840m.
Brian McClendon, VP, Geo at Google confirmed the acquisition in a blog post today, stating that: “The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now.”
He went on to write that Google is “excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”
The Drum reported that Facebook was also interested in the start-up, which uses satellite signals from members’ smartphones to generate maps and traffic data and then shares with other users, offering real-time traffic information. According to reports at the time it offered £650m for the sat-nav company, while Apple also considered a bid.