The news of Summify being acquired by Twitter is great news for Romanian entrepreneurs. It’s one more proof that you can be successful, coming from this part of the world. There’s a bit of a controversy on weather this was a good exit or not – check out Natasha’s post on Goal Europe. All debates on the exit strategy aside, it is undoubtedly recognition of the value the Summify team created. 

So let’s go back in time a little and watch the course the Summify team took, from day – let’s call it – zero, when they started in Romania with an idea, up to the moment of selling their company to one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I started tracing their steps following past Summify blog posts. Here’s how the story went:

Starting ReadFu

A blog post dating December 15th, 2009, announces the launch of ReadFu – a service meant to help its users rapidly surf through web pages that contained lots of links. The app would do that by creating a contextual summary and stats of the target page every time a link was clicked, thus helping the user decide which links were relevant before opening a whole bunch of new pages. At the moment, the service hadn’t gone public – and as the future would show, it would never get to that point – and the team was made up by Cristian Strat, Mircea Pasoi and Silviu Ganceanu.

The same month, a post on the blog of Bootup Labs (dated December 18th) was announcing ReadFu’s acceptance for the Bootup Labs program for January 2010. Thus, in January 2010, the guys moved to Vancouver to join Bootup Labs with ReadFu.

The Bootup Labs experience

After the mentoring sessions and the feedback recieved there, they realized that they had “a really good solution for the wrong problem”, as they state in one post. So they pivoted and started building Summify, as it would be announced in March.

In an interview for the How to Web blog, in the summer of 2011, Mircea was describing the Vancouver experience: “We need help from people who have actually done this startup thing before for real, because you can’t do it by reading TechCrunch and imagining things. There’s no shame in this – experience matters, people matter, the network you have matters.. and for the moment we have to go somewhere else (Vancouver, London, Silicon Valley, etc.) to get this knowledge and experience. But let’s hope that in a few generations that experience will be available in Romania and we’ll start having a real ecosystem that can create international-level companies.”.

Now, in the moment of the acquisition, Danny Robinson of Bootup Labs remembers the moment the guys joined the accelerator: “I wasn’t a fan of the idea that they were presenting, but then Boris reminded me of our own rule. ”We don’t back ideas, we back PEOPLE”. After a few more conversations with Cristian and Mircea, I was sold.”

ReadFu pivots and becomes Summify

The announcement that ReadFu became Summify is released on March 19th, 2010. Summify is at that moment in private beta, delivering “insightful summaries for any link on the web”, aggregating the links from the user’s social feeds and curating them based on the user’s social and interest graph.

In May 2010, Silviu leaves the Summify team and joins Google as Software Engineer. After Mircea and Cristian moved back to Vancouver, in August 2010 Summify was starting to roll out invitations to people who had earlier subscribed to the waiting list of their service. At the time, they had support for Twitter and Google Reader, stating the Facebook and Google Buzz( heh, Buzz ) was on the way. The app was then described as a “social news reader”.

August 2010 is also the month that Summify closes its second seed funding round, with W Media Ventures, following the first seed investment received from the Bootup Labs in March.

Summify also gathers multiple angel investments in March 2011, from Stewart Butterfield, Boris Wertz, Steve Olechowski, Rob Glaser, Mike Edwards, Jim Fletcher, Brent Holliday and, Accel Partners, according to CrunchBase.

Sold to the company with the birdy logo!

One year and a half after the launch of the Summify product in its final form, January 19th 2012, comes the big news: Summify is acquired by Twitter. As the guys announce, they will be “joining Twitter’s Growth team and will continue to explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.” According to their announcement, some features will be removed immediately, new registrations have already been stopped and, in a matter of weeks, the current Summfy product will be shut down.

“As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.”

We hope to soon discover the Summify app neatly integrated into a new Twitter feature. Or maybe its technology will be used to improve the recently added Discover feature, as TheNextWeb guesses.

Whatever the future holds for Cristian and Mircea, we’ve got our fingers crossed and we’re keeping an eye on you guys!