Instapaper Sells Majority Stake to Digg’s Owners, Betaworks

Popular ‘read it later’ service Instapaper has been sold to Betaworks, the company that currently owns Digg. As detailed by Instapaper founder Marco Arment, Betaworks has acquired a majority stake in the service; rest assured the app and service will continue on into the future:

I’m happy to announce that I’ve sold a majority stake in Instapaper to Betaworks. We’ve structured the deal with Instapaper’s health and longevity as the top priority, with incentives to keep it going well into the future. I will continue advising the project indefinitely, while Betaworks will take over its operations, expand its staff, and develop it further.

I’ve known Betaworks for years, and I’ve spent a lot of lunches at their office. They have great engineering talent, great product direction, and plenty of experience running services at Instapaper’s scale. I wouldn’t put Instapaper in just anyone’s hands, and I know that they’ll do right by it.

Betaworks acquired Digg last summer for $500,000 and the latter is currently building a Google Reader replacement. Arment, a former lead developer from Tumblr, noted he thought of Betaworks as a potential buyer of his service “a couple of months ago,” most likely timed with Google’s announcement to shut down their popular RSS service. Congrats to Arment on this sale.