Snapchat is buying a company you’ve never heard of for $110 million

Snapchat is planning on acquiring a little-known search company called Vurb for $110 million: 75 percent in stock and 25 percent cash. Now, suddenly, people all over the tech world who have never heard of Vurb are trying to figure out why.

What is Vurb? Well, Vurb is a noun that describes a five-year old company that originally had the bold vision of beating Google at their own game in the mobile sphere. The search app is actually pretty ingenious.

Using location data, the app lets you quickly find food, activities, entertainment, and events near you, then save or share bundled search results with friends. That way shared content contains information pulled from the likes of Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Google Maps, and so on.

It’s one of those things that’s intuitive to use but cumbersome to describe. Perhaps that’s why Vurb never really caught on for Android or Apple users. The company originally raised $10 million from investors, but failed to gain traction.

Now Snapchat is buying them out big time, and nobody is really sure why. The Information postulates that Snapchat might want to use the company’s search technology to make finding users or content easier. Right now, Snapchat’s search functions are rudimentary at best.

However, another possibility is that Snapchat is aiming to integrate Vurb’s social sharing capabilities with snaps directly, allowing users to share information – not just experiences – with their snaps.

We’ll have to wait and see what the transitory social media platform has planned for Vurb, but for now we can speculate. What do you think Snapchat has up their sleeve? Let us know in the comments below!