Twitter announced that it has agreed to acquire mobile ad exchange MoPub.

With MoPub, app publishers can manage their inventory and multiple sources of advertising (direct ads, house ads, ad network and real-time bidding).

“The two major trends in the ad world right now are the rapid consumer shift toward mobile usage, and the industry shift to programmatic buying,” said Twitter VP, Revenue Product, Kevin Well. “Twitter sits at the intersection of these, and we think by bringing MoPub’s technology and team to Twitter, we can further drive these trends for the benefit of consumers, advertisers, and agencies.”

“The MoPub team has built a leading mobile ad exchange, and their focus on providing transparency to advertisers and publishers aligns with our values,” added Well. “We’ll continue to invest in and improve their core business. In particular, we think there is a key opportunity to extend many types of native advertising across the mobile ecosystem through the MoPub exchange.”

Twitter says it plans to use MoPub’s technology to build real-time bidding into the Twitter ads platform.

MoPub CEO Jim Payne wrote in a blog post, “It’s important to underscore that our commitment to you, the publisher, will not change. In fact, it will be strengthened. Twitter will invest in our core business and we will continue to build the tools and technology you need to better run your mobile advertising business.”

“In addition to investing in new capabilities for our publisher platform, we believe there are opportunities to bring better native advertising to the mobile ecosystem,” he said. “With the support of the team and resources of Twitter, we’ll be able to move even more quickly towards the realization of our original vision.”

MoPub has about a hundred employees around the world, and the company says it serves billions of mobile ads per month.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but TechCrunch says it hears the deal was around $350 million in stock.

This follows other recent acquisitions by Twitter: Trendrr and Marakana.

Image: MoPub