Microsoft Acquires Sunrise Calendar App. Reportedly for $100 Million

Minecraft, Accompli and Sunrise. Microsoft’s recent acquisitions for a mobile first, cloud first world.

Update: Microsoft have now confirmed the acquisition of Sunrise on their blog. Microsoft made the following statement on the blog: “We are making this acquisition because we believe a reinvention in the way people use calendars on mobile devices is long overdue. Our goal is to better help people manage and make the most of their time in a mobile-first, cloud-first world.” They confirmed the app will remain free and in-market supporting a variety of third party services.

Last Wednesday, rumours surfaced the internet that Microsoft were rumoured to acquire popular calendar app ‘Sunrise’ for iOS and Android. Today, Microsoft uploaded a new video to their YouTube channel which made the announcement of the Sunrise acquisition. While no press release has been set out yet, the video description mentions “Microsoft’s Steve Clayton talks reinventing productivity with the CEOs of Sunrise and Acompli, two companies recently acquired by Microsoft.” The part about the “two companies recently acquired by Microsoft” being key.

Sunrise fits in with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Accompli, the popular email service on iOS and Android that the new Outlook App for iOS, Android and soon Windows 10 was built around. Sunrise is the calendar side to this and will most likely be integrated and re-branded for the Outlook calendar services. However, Outlook already has a pretty good built-in calendar system to it’ll be interesting to see how it’s all integrated. Once again, this all fits in with what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said last year about Microsoft being more open to acquisitions that can help improve and integrate Microsoft current devices and services.

We’ll update you on further developments.