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Lyft acquires, shuts down Q&A app startup

March 21, 2017

Human cloud firm Lyft acquired startup FinitePaths, a company that produced an app called Trail Answers that allowed users to answer and ask everyday questions from their social networks or others in the local area.

Following the acquisition, Trail Answers stopped signing up new users for the app and will be shutting down the app for existing users during next two weeks.

“Lyft has a grand vision to see the world where the transportation and technology brings people together, not apart,” FinitePaths cofounders Balaji Raghavan and Vinay Kakade wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. “Everyone we met at Lyft was super sharp and intelligent yet so humble. The technical challenges are exciting and we believe we can make the right contributions based on our prior experience and what we have built at FinitePaths.”

“We are very excited to have Balaji and Vinay join our team,” said Luc Vincent, VP of engineering at Lyft. “They have extensive experience building large scale infrastructure and services. We see this experience as playing a critical role in helping us tackle some of the unique challenges we have at Lyft, as well as helping grow the Lyft community.”

Raghavan is an ex-Google and served as engineering director for the company in 2015 while co-founder Kakade was the head of engineering at Amazon’s CloudSearch in India, The Tech Portal reported. Together, the duo will help Lyft expand its infrastructure to keep pace with its rapid growth in new markets.