Twitter’s latest talent buyout comes in the form of Hotspots.io

Twitter has acquired social analytics start-up Hotspots.io for an undisclosed sum, with the Hotspots.io team expected to join Twitter.

Based in the United States, Hotspots.io provides analytics and data for social media. The team includes Matt Huang, Alexander Spicer and Ashutosh Singhal and Hotspots.io is a graduate of US-based start-up incubator Y Combinator.

The company has announced on its main site it will be joining Twitter’s revenue engineering team and will be working on analytics tools for the micro-blogging platform.

It appears that Hostots.io will no longer be functioning, suggesting the deal is an acqui-hire, whereby a company is acquired for its team, rather than its products or technology.

“We’re incredibly excited to announce that Twitter has acquired the Hotspots.io team,” Hotspots.io wrote on its website.

“We’ll be joining up with Twitter’s revenue engineering team where our focus will be on developing analytics tools for Twitter’s advertising and publishing partners.”

“We founded Hotspots.io with the vision of helping companies and individuals maximise their social media ROI through actionable and accessible analytics.”

“We’re thrilled to be able to continue that work on a much larger scale at Twitter.”

In an email to TechCrunch, a Twitter spokesperson confirmed the company is “excited that the team at Hotspots.io is joining Twitter”.

Earlier this year, Twitter acquired social aggregation service Summify in what it appeared to be another talent buyout, with the Summify team relocating to Twitter’s head office.

Founded by Romanian-born tech entrepreneurs Mircea Pasoi and Cristian Strat, Summify used social data to create personalised news digests.

The Summify service focused on giving users less news, instead of more, by sending users daily email summaries of only the most important stories.

Meanwhile, it’s been reported mobile gaming company Funzio is looking to raise US$50 million at a $350 million pre-money valuation, although Funzio has declined to comment on the reports.

Funzio is the maker of Crime City and Modern War, both of which have held top ranks on the grossing charts on iOS.

The company’s chief executive, Ken Chiu, previously sold a start-up to industry giant Zynga and served as a general manager there for almost a year.

Funzio has a proven ability to launch games on Facebook and mobile platforms. At its peak, Crime City had 7.3 million monthly active users on Facebook, according to AppData.

It now has 1.6 million monthly active users. The company’s two iOS games have continued to keep grossing rankings in the top 50 in the US since the beginning of the year.

If Funzio does go out at a $350 million pre-money valuation, it’s worth comparing that against other valuations in the mobile gaming space.

Around the same time last year, Rovio closed a $42 million round of funding that gave it a post-money valuation of around $200 million.

Another mobile gaming company, Addmired, recently renamed itself Machine Zone and picked up $8 million in a round led by Menlo Ventures.