Intuit Buys Lettuce Apps For $30M To Add Inventory And Order Management To Quickbooks

 Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch writes: Some consolidation afoot in world of cloud-based enterprise services. Intuit has made another acquisition to help position itself as the go-to place for small and medium businesses to run their offices in the cloud: it has bought Lettuce, a platform for companies to manage both orders and inventory online. Lettuce is not disclosing the terms of the deal in its announcement, but we have confirmed with sources that the price tag was $30 million, a figure first reported in Pando Daily.

A spokesperson for Intuit said the company was not releasing terms of the deal “as it isn’t material to their business.” This is the company’s 17th acquisition.

Unlike some acquisitions that see the buyer shut down the newly owned product, either in a talent acquisition or with the intention of using some of the tech in a new service altogether, in this case Intuit will be continuing to operate Lettuce as a standalone app. It will also integrate it further into its flagship SMB office accounting product, Quickbooks (there had already been an integration; now it gets deeper).

“We are so excited to join Intuit and take our product to the next level. With Intuit’s reach, we will now be able to help millions of SMBs solve the same problems we felt when we originally designed Lettuce for our previous inventory based dog toy company,” CEO and founder Raad Mobrem tells me. “Lettuce is all about solving a huge inventory and order management void with incredibly simple and well designed cloud software. And the need was definitely there.”

He says the company was growing 30-40% month over month and “our churn was incredibly low.” There were “thousands” of customers, he tells me.

He adds that they will be staying in Venice Beach, Calif., where they were founded. “I am very excited about the entire deal and look forward to helping Intuit continue in innovating cloud/mobile services for the future,” he says.

In the blog post announcing the news, he explains a bit more about the transition:

“While this is a big step for Lettuce, it doesn’t mean that much will change,” he writes. “Since the beginning, we’ve worked hard to improve the way you manage your orders and inventory so you can eliminate time-consuming, tedious tasks and spend more time doing the things you love. We plan on continuing down this path and once the transaction is closed, with Intuit’s support, we plan to accelerate this tremendously.”

When we wrote about Lettuce’s $2.1 million funding round back in 2012 from investors like 500 Startups and Crosscut Ventures, we noted that the company had by that point processed some $2 million in orders.   [snip]    click here to read the rest of the article at TechCrunch.