Samsung said late Wednesday it is buying startup Joyent, which provides hosted cloud computing to various companies.
Samsung is buying cloud computing startup Joyent
Terms were not disclosed, but the company’s top management will join the Korean electronics giant.
Vjeran Pavic for Re/code
In a blog post, Joyent CEO Scott Hammond said that his company would operate as an independent subsidiary, serving existing customers while adding Samsung as an “anchor tenant,” giving the company the heft it has lacked to compete against larger players, such as Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure.
“We lacked the scale required to compete effectively in the large, rapidly growing and fiercely competitive cloud computing market,” Hammond said. “Now, that changes.”
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Samsung said that Hammond, Joyent CTO Bryan Cantrill and product VP Bill Fine will all join Samsung.
Joyent’s early investors include Intel Capital and Peter Thiel.
It’s not clear exactly how Samsung plans to tap Joyent’s cloud know-how, but increasingly more of the work on mobile devices is being handled in the cloud, including image recognition and artificial intelligence-powered automated assistants.
Samsung has bought several U.S. startups in recent years while also partnering with others, but it has struggled to expand beyond its devices and into the broader market for software and services.
Its biggest recent deals were last year’s $250 million purchase of LoopPay, which formed the basis of Samsung Pay, and its $200 million purchase of SmartThings, which makes an internet-of-things hub.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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