Twitter hires RestEngine team

A graphic displayed on RestEngine's website

Twitter has hired most of the team of employees at San Francisco-based RestEngine, an email marketing company that describes itself as a “social marketing automation platform," said RestEngine cofounder Joe Waltman.

Contrary to some reports, Twitter did not acquire RestEngine, but rather hired most of the company's team. Waltman called it a "talent acquisition."

Waltman said that exactly what the RestEngine team will be doing at Twitter is yet to be determined, but added: “You can see the writing on the wall. We help social applications target outbound email. The team will be doing similar stuff for Twittter.” RestEngine, he said, will be phased out.

RestEngine cofounder Josh Aberant will be “postmaster” at Twitter, Waltman said. “The other guys will probably be software engineers and developers,” he said. Waltman will be the only member of the RestEngine team who won't be joining Twitter, a choice he said was made for personal reasons.

“We're very excited to announce that the RestEngine team is joining the Twitter flock!” the company wrote on its website. “Just over two and a half years ago we founded RestEngine to help social app publishers send targeted one-to-one emails based on a subscriber's social graph. It's been an incredible journey where we had the opportunity to work with some of the leading social app publishers.”

According to RestEngine's website, the company's clients included Kaboom Social Games, Crowd Star and Social Weekend.

During the past couple of months, Twitter has acquired multiple companies, including Dasient, a web security company, in January, and Hotspots.io, a social analytics startup in April.