Katie Keith, CEO of Barn2, announced that Kestrel has acquired seven plugins from her company for an undisclosed amount. She had tweeted about her plans to sell the plugins back in January to focus on the more profitable plugins.
This is Kestrel’s first acquisition. Kestrel is a new venture by the former co-founders of SkyVerge (creator of over 60 WooCommerce add-ons and acquired by GoDaddy in 2020). Their website describes the team as “a small but mighty team of seasoned WooCommerce professionals — we’re some of the top non-Automattic contributors to the open source WooCommerce project.”
The acquisition encompasses five premium plugins and two free plugins, including WooCommerce Variation Prices, WooCommerce Express Shop Page, WooCommerce Shipping Calculator, WooCommerce Product Sample, WooCommerce Discontinued Products, and the free plugins WooCommerce Custom Add to Cart Button and Better Recent Comments.
Katie explained, “it makes sense to put the most resources into the plugins which have the biggest user base and which fit best with our other plugins. As a result, in early 2024 we made a team decision that we should sell some of our plugins to a company who will give them the attention they deserve so that we can concentrate our efforts on providing even greater value and support for our remaining suite of plugins.”
Under the acquisition terms, the existing annual and lifetime customers will continue to receive full support, updates and maintenance from the Kestral team. Barn2 has plans in place for customers who purchased the acquired plugins through bundle plans and the All Access Pass plan.
Max Rice, Founding Engineer of Kestrel told us, “We’re very excited to jump back into the Woo space with the launch of Kestrel! We’ve worked with WooCommerce since 2012, and have been familiar with Barn2’s work for some time — we’re excited to kickstart our new venture with a group of high-quality plugins from a team we respect.”