Twitter acquires Chroma Labs founded by Facebook veterans

San Francisco, Feb 19 (IANS) Twitter has acquired California-based Chroma Labs that develops tools for short-form video and photo creation and was founded by seven Facebook and Instagram workers in 2018.

The Chroma Stories app let users fill in stylish layout templates and frames for posting collages and more to Instagram Stories, Snapchat and more.

“Thrilled to welcome the amazing @Chroma_Labs teama They’ll join our product, design, and eng teams working to give people more creative ways to express themselves on Twitter,” posted Kayvon Beykpour on Tuesday who is product lead at the micro-blogging platform.

Twitter, however, did not disclose the amount it paid for the acquisition.

During the past year, Chroma Labs has enabled creators and businesses around the world to create millions of stories with the Chroma Stories app.

“As part of this (acquisition), we’re shutting down our business, effective immediately. You’ll still be able to use the Chroma Stories app to craft amazing stories as long as the app remains installed on your phone, and until there is some breaking change in a future iOS update,” the company said in a statement.

According to Sensor Tower, nearly 615,000 people have installed Chroma Stories app.

Chroma Labs’ co-founders include Instagram ‘Boomerang’ inventor John Barnett, CTO Alex Li, who was an engineering manager on Facebook Photos and Instagram Stories, and Joshua Harris who was a product design manager on Facebook’s augmented reality team.

With Chroma Stories, users can choose between retro filters, holiday themed frames and collage templates.