Credit Card processing company Square has announced that it will be buying website-building company Weebly for a price of $365 million.
The deal will be a cash-and-stock deal which will help small businesses to use both Weebly and Square to develop websites and online stores easily. Weebly is a website-building company, similar to WordPress or Squarespace. Sequoia, Tencent, and Y Combinator back Weebly and compete with players like Medium, a company formed by former Twitter CEO, Evan Williams.
Jack Dorsey, the current CEO of Twitter, runs Square, a financial technology company that is famous for its ever-popular square, white payment devices. These devices are typically used by small businesses with iPads to read credit cards. Square has been performing well on Wall Street, with its stock prices rising at a rate of 35 percent year-to-date.
This merger will end in the second quarter of 2018, and employees of Weebly will get stocks of Square which will be vested over a period of the next four years. Square has indicated that the deal will add recurring revenue to Square’s business and help its international expansion.
Square has been undergoing fast diversification in its business. Recently, it announced the acquisition of Zesty, a startup in corporate catering. As soon as the Weebly deal was announced, shares of Square rose by half a percent.
