Pebble Halts Sales As Fitbit Confirms Acquisition

We’ve been hearing for about a week now that Fitbit is likely to acquire Pebble. The latter has competed in the wearable device market for a couple of years now and even though it was off to a good start, its situation hasn’t really been that good recently. Fitbit has officially announced today that it’s acquiring Pebble’s key assets which don’t include hardware. Fitbit has therefore halted sales of its smartwatches.

While terms of the deal haven’t been officially confirmed, it’s believed that Fitbit paid around $40 million for Pebble’s assets. The company has offered jobs to most of Pebble’s software engineers. Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky will not be joining Fitbit.

Fitbit co-founder and CEO James Park says that his company “sees an opportunity to build on our strengths and extend our leadership position in the wearables category” with this acquisition. He adds that this acquisition will aid Fitbit’s expansion of its platform and ecosystem to make its products a vital part of daily life for even more customers.

Pebble will no longer promote, manufacture or sell any wearable devices. The company does point out that all of its existing products will continue to work as expected. No immediate changes will be made to the Pebble user experience, however, it does point out that Pebble functionality or service quality “may be reduced in the future.”

The company’s newest products – the Pebble Time 2 and Core – stand canceled. All those who backed them on Kickstarter will receive refunds over the next four to eight weeks.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: fitbit, pebble