Adaptive Path, a San Francisco-based design and user experience consultancy, has been acquired by financial firm Capital One.
That’s not the most obvious acquirer, but in his announcement, Adaptive Path co-founder and Chief Creative Officer Jesse James Garrett said that after talking to a number of potential acquirers in the years since it was founded in 2001, Capital One was first one to seem like a good fit:
You can see where this is going, right? Somebody came along who finally, truly, seemed to get it. A company with a great culture that shares and values our intellectual curiosity and design sensibilities, that wants us to continue doing great work inside their organization, but also continue helping others do great work too, by fostering dialogue and teaching what we have learned. And that somebody, remarkably, turned out to be Capital One.
Garrett also said that the Adaptive Path team will stay together, and that it will continue to organize events and post on the Adaptive Path site. What it won’t be doing, however, is providing any more outside design consulting — all of that will now be directed towards “solving experience design problems for Capital One.”
Adaptive Path also seems noteworthy for its founding team of Garrett, Lane Becker, Janice Fraser, Mike Kuniavsky, Peter Merholz, Jeffrey Veen, and Indi Young — many of whom went on to start other companies. (I was amused to learn that Merholz coined the term “blog”.)
Oh, and by the way, if you’re still skeptical about whether the two companies are a good fit, Capital One launched a new mobile wallet app yesterday, which TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez described as “surprisingly well-designed for an app coming from a traditional financial institution.” So there’s that.
image credit: adaptive path