Facebook marketing firm Betapond has bought into the Tech City development by acquiring iPlatform.

London, Dublin and San Jose-based Betapond has purchased iPlatform, a Facebook developer located in East London.

The deal has been announced at Facebook’s new London office. In July Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is set up its first engineering centre outside of the US, with London being described as a ‘perfect fit for Facebook engineering’ by Philip Su, a software engineer at the social media company.

According to Betapond, the combined company will offer global brands and agencies involved ‘greater scale and depth’ of resources for developing Facebook integrations.

The company adds that the undisclosed deal is a sign of the ‘maturity’ of the Facebook development sector following a number of acquisitions of Facebook developers by big technology and marketing automation companies in the past 18 months.

Declan Kennedy, co-founder and chief executive of Betapond, comments, ‘This acquisition gives Betapond a deeper pool of engineering talent and increases our scale in London.

‘The iPlatform team brings a depth of experience and talent that will allow us to offer brands a competitive edge in advanced Facebook marketing.’

Following the completion of the transaction, Betapond will grow to 30 London-based employees by 2012. Betapond closed a €1.15 million (£914,000) round of venture capital funding in January 2012 when it was backed by Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland.

iPlatform co-founder Joshua March says that Betapond is ‘uniquely positioned’ to help take the company vision and team to the next level.

He adds, ‘We started iPlatform in 2008 because we believed that the Facebook platform was the most genuine way for companies to engage with their customers.’