Squarespace is announcing its first acquisition today, a 13-year-old company called Acuity Scheduling that allows businesses to manage their online appointments.
Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena noted that the company has been expanding beyond website building already — he said he now wants to provide tools around online presence (i.e. building a website), commerce and marketing.
To do that, Squarespace has been building its own products, but in this case, Casalena said it made more sense to just bring Acuity on-board, particularly because there’s already an integration between Acuity’s scheduling software and Squarespace’s page-building tools.
“What [CEO Gavin Zuchlinski] had built at Acuity is a great business,” he said. “It’s been growing pretty organically up until this point, with 45 employees who really understand the space and a very customer-centric culture. They have a great product. That would just be faster for us [to acquire them], versus building our own product.”