On September 2, Adobe announced it had acquired Rilo, an Indian marketing automation startup. Rilo launched in September 2025 and picked up 10,000 users in under a year — you'd type a plain-English instruction like "ping me on Slack whenever a competitor ships a new feature," and its AI agent would carry it out across hundreds of connected services: Slack, Salesforce, Gmail, and more. The deal terms were never disclosed. The six-person team joined Adobe. And the product stopped working the same day — existing customers can no longer log in.
Adobe took the team, not the tool
This wasn't really an acquisition so much as an acqui-hire. What Adobe wanted was Rilo's technology and its people, not a promise to keep running Rilo as a service. A startup that raised $1 million at a $10 million valuation getting absorbed by a much bigger company a year after launch isn't unusual in itself. What happens next is the part worth paying attention to.
The product shut down. The access it was granted didn't.
To do its job, a workflow-automation tool like Rilo needs users to grant it access ahead of time — permission to read and act inside their Slack workspace, their Salesforce account, their Gmail. That access, however, is stored on the user's side of the connection, not the vendor's. So when the company behind the tool gets absorbed and the product goes dark, that access doesn't vanish along with it — someone has to go in and revoke it by hand. Days after the Rilo acquisition, an independent analysis flagged exactly this: the access grants sitting inside Slack and Salesforce stay live until a user manually revokes them, and only the Gmail grant expires on its own, and only after Google's system sees six months of inactivity.
What's certain and what isn't — The acquisition date (September 2), team size (six), user count (10,000+), and the product's immediate shutdown are all confirmed by TechCrunch. The claim that access grants persist, though, comes from an independent outlet's technical analysis, not an official statement from Adobe or Rilo, and there's no confirmed number for how many users still have live grants sitting out there. What can be said here is only that this structural risk has been raised, not that it's been measured.
If your site gets 100 visitors a week
If any automation tool, AI agent, or newsletter tool you currently use has access to your Slack, your Google account, or your CRM, don't treat a shutdown email from that vendor as the end of the story. Open your Google account's security settings and check the "third-party app access" list; open Slack's connected-apps list under workspace settings. Look at what's still connected, and revoke anything you no longer use. A tool disappears the moment its company folds — the key you handed it doesn't, not until you take it back yourself.