VentureBeat

Paltalk, the profitable chat startup that bought back its own stock earlier this year, acquired Vumber to offer phone number privacy services today. They didn’t disclose the acquisition price — but Vumber had 3,000 paying subscribers and a monthly rate of $9.95 per month.

Vumber gives you an extra number for your phone in case you want to keep your real one private. It’s a service you could use for dating or if you’re a salesperson and you use one phone for both work and personal needs.

“They were running out of money and were more scaling down,” said Paltalk CEO Jason Katz. “I think there’s a natural synergy between our services. We can take theirs and expose it to our larger paybase.”

New York-based Paltalk has about 4 million active users, and subscriptions make up the majority of its revenue. About 85 percent of that subscription revenue comes from paid consumer accounts, and the rest comes from businesses that use Paltalk for meetings.

The company is also trying to expand its video conferencing services with a new product called SuperIM that lets you video chat with people on PalTalk, AIM, ICQ and Yahoo Instant Messenger. It says its underlying technology is robust enough to support up to 5,000 people video chatting at once. (TinyChat offers a similar service that doesn’t require you to download a client.)

The company has done well enough that it was able to buy back its shares from venture investor SoftBank at a profit in July. SoftBank originally invested $6 million in the company.

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Tags: co:paltalk, inv:Softbank