Internet giant Google Inc. (GOOG) said in a blog post Tuesday that it has closed the acquisition of Israeli mapping startup Waze.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed in the blog post, but media reports said the purchase price was about $1.1 billion, citing people familiar with the matter.
"The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We're excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google's search capabilities," Brian McClendon, Google's Vice President, Geo, said in the blog post.
Waze was founded in 2008 in Israel by Uri Levine, software engineer Ehud Shabtai, and Amir Shinar.
Waze differs from traditional GPS navigation software as it is a community-driven application and learns from users' driving times to provide routing and real-time traffic updates It is also free to download and use, as it gathers map data and other information from users who use the service.
Social networking giant Facebook Inc. (FB) was said to be in talks to spend over $1 billion to buy Waze, but it reportedly pulled out of talks after the two parties could not come to agreement about relocating operations.
Last month, rival Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) agreed to buy social media network Tumblr for about $1.1 billion.
Google shares are currently trading at $873.32, down $9.47 or 1.07%.
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