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AngelList, the company that helps investors find startups to invest in, has acquired Product Hunt, the company that lets people share and discover new products posted by other users.
The acquisition price was around $20 million, according to numerous sources familiar with the terms. That’s roughly the same valuation Product Hunt had when it took $6 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others back in late 2014.
Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover declined to comment on the deal terms, but says he will continue to run Product Hunt as its own brand under the AngelList umbrella.
“The word that AngelList has been using to some extent is ‘continuity,’” Hoover told Recode. “Over time, we’ll explore ways of doing direct integrations. We probably won’t see anything in the short term, but down the road you might see some of the talent pieces of AngelList come over to Product Hunt and maybe some of the Product Discovery aspects go to AngelList.”
Product Hunt has become somewhat of a Silicon Valley darling since 2014, even before it was accepted to prominent seed accelerator Y Combinator. Investors often use Product Hunt to see what apps and services are trending (and thus ripe for investment). Entrepreneurs use it to get the word out about about their new inventions. As Recode reported 18 months ago, the service was “playing the role of kingmaker” in Silicon Valley.
So why, then, is Product Hunt selling? Because it needed some help turning that momentum into an actual business, Hoover said. Product Hunt doesn’t have a real revenue stream, and some of its money-making ideas, like connecting users with job openings at interested startups, are things AngelList is already doing.
“[Building a revenue stream] requires a whole new focus within our company and a lot more resources to actually make that work, not only from a product perspective but also from a sales and marketing perspective,” Hoover explained. “We’d basically be building some of the same things [AngelList] would be doing to some extent. So on the revenue side that’s a large accelerant.”
Hoover says he’ll be taking “most” of his company’s 14 employees to AngelList. He’ll report directly to AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant, who was also a Product Hunt investor.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
