Acqui-hire

Definitions

Acqui-hire (also spelled acquihire or acq-hire) is an acquisition strategy in the technology industry where a company purchases another company primarily to recruit its engineering talent rather than to obtain its products, intellectual property, or customer base. The acquired company's products are typically discontinued after the deal closes, and the team is absorbed into the acquiring organization. This approach became common during periods of intense competition for software engineers, particularly from 2010 onward, when major tech companies found it faster and more reliable to buy entire teams than to recruit individuals one by one. The deal structure often includes retention packages for key employees, making it partially an elaborate hiring bonus. For struggling startups, an acqui-hire provides a dignified exit, employment for the team, and some return for investors. Typical acqui-hire valuations range from one to three million dollars per engineer. The practice has drawn criticism for inflating startup valuations and creating perverse incentives where founding a startup is pursued primarily as a path to a big-company job.
In plain English: Buying a company mainly to hire its talented employees, not for the product itself.
Example: "Google acqui-hired the team behind that ML startup — killed the product on day one but got eight PhD researchers."