Rumor: Google negotiating to buy Olive for $70+M
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We’re hearing Google is in talks to buy Olive Software, of Santa Clara, for between $70 and $80 million.
Olive, which is backed with about $21 million in venture capital from Sequoia Capital and Pitango, makes a company’s data files accessible from the Web. So you can see why Google might want to promote this technology: By crawling even more data, it can provide better search results.
Olive converts PDF documents, microfilm and any other files to XML, a format which can be used with any database, Web browser, or application that supports it. At the same time, Olive preserves the document’s content, structure and layout.
We want to be clear: This is unconfirmed. We’ve contacted both Google and Olive, but neither has responded to our requests for comment. Earlier today, we talked live with Google and they said they’d get back to us. We don’t like dealing in rumors, but our secret source on this one has been accurate about 80 percent of the time, and the other times there has been some sort of truth to the rumor. And besides, this is a blog, right….?
Knight Ridder, the owner of the Mercury News (for which we work on our day jobs) has been a customer of Olive’s.
Update: Here’s what we got from a Google spokesman: “We do not comment on rumor or speculation.” By the way, this is their typical response, whether something is true, or false.
Update II: This acquisition is off.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
