Kik Interactive acquires Toronto fashion mobile service Blynk

Waterloo, Ontario’s Kik Interactive Inc. has acquired Blynk, a Toronto-based mobile fashion app developer responsible for their personal fashion stylist called BlynkStyle, which will now be a chat bot on the Kik messaging app, which boasts 240 million American tween and teenage users.

The BlynkStyle bot will be paired with options to rate outfits, take quizzes and buy clothes, within the Kik chat experience.

Blynk was founded in December 2013 by CEO Jaclyn Ling and CTO Shums Kassam as a kind of Tinder for clothes, allowing users to swipe through photos of different looks.

Blynk won at the International Startup Festival in Montreal in 2014, and was named top retail startup at the 2015 Fintech and Retail EXPO, run by Silicon Valley’s Plug and Play Tech Center.

The Blynk acquisition will help Kik “further delve into the world of bots and personal chat assistants on Kik.”

Founded in 2009 by University of Waterloo graduate and ex-BlackBerry employee Ted Livingstone, Kik is the result of Livingston’s attempt to convince Research in Motion to take BlackBerry Messenger cross-platform.

The company declined, prompting Livingstone to set out on his own, establishing offices for Kik in Waterloo, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles, and building the company to a valuation of over $1 billion.

In August, Kik closed a $50 million Series D funding round, led by Tencent, developers of the Weixin (WeChat) Chinese messaging app.

Financial terms of the Blynk acquisition were not disclosed. Blynk is Kik’s third acquisition.