Whenever a company goes really hush-hush about an acquisition you know something is up. If you remember how much noise they made about the Certicom purchase you will notice it paled compared to their purchase of Dash Navigation.
David Freeburg of SeekingAlpha did a bit of digging into RIM’s filings and found some interesting details. Since RIM only purchased Certicom and Dash in the last year it was not that had to see how much they paid for Dash. They do not even mention Dash in their filings but rather refer to it as “a company whose proprietary software will be incorporated into the Company’s software.” RIM paid $111 million for Certicom which left $8.3 Million for Dash since Dash had only $1.1 million in cash on hand.
That $8.3 million is pretty sad considering the fact that Dash raised over $71 million in its three rounds of financing. David goes into some detail about another $26 million in tax credits RIM received from the purchase but I don’t really understand how that works. It just sounds like RIM got the better end of this deal. Nice work RIM! 🙂
Now I have to say I am still hoping that RIM incorporates some of Dash’s crowd-sourcing features into the BlackBerry OS… Certicom was an obvious purchase but I don’t understand why RIM is being so quiet about Dash.
