Twitter Grabs AdGrok for Revenue Team

Twitter has acquired the search engine marketing start-up AdGrok, or at least two of its founders, who will be engineers on Twitter’s monetization team. AdGrok’s products will be shut down June 30.

Update: A Twitter spokesman confirmed that Twitter did not acquire AdGrok’s assets, but rather hired its team.

AdGrok, which automated Google AdWords management, had raised about $500,000 from investors including early Twitter backer Chris Sacca and Y Combinator. One of the co-founders, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, already had left to work at Facebook.

Twitter has said it would like to build a self-serve platform for its Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts advertising products. It seems like a natural fit for these guys.

Talk of the deal had first surfaced on TechCrunch yesterday.