Apple has reportedly acquired Stamplay, an Italian developer platform co-founded by Giuliano Iacobelli and Nicola Mattina, for a reported five million euros, or about $5.7 million US dollars.

As first spotted by setteBIT, the deal was reported this morning by Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. The Italian-language report appears to lack Apple’s standard boilerplate statement.

The Stamplay website was stripped of lots of content in the past few weeks ahead of the acquisition, a tell-tale sign of an Apple deal. When Apple does acquire small startups, it usually issues a semi-confirmation in the form of a statement saying, “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”.

According to the Stamplay website, their low-code workflow automation platform lets businesses streamline manual work by integrating data and business apps. As noted by MacRumors, Stamplay’s API-based development platform lets developers build and launch “full-featured cloud-based web apps.”

This is from Stamplay’s LinkedIn page:

The powerful web-based editor includes everything a developer needs to create and run a powerful backend for their app, including popular APIs like Stripe (payments), Sendgrid (email), Twilio (SMS and VoIP), Pusher (realtime notifications) and many more.

Apple has never been big on cloud computing in a sense that would make it acquire specialized startups. This acqui-hire, or talent-based acquisition, could result in some new web services from Apple, though I’m just speculating.

It could also amount to nothing.

Thoughts?