San Francisco — Embarking on yet another acquisition drive, Facebook has gobbled up a small firm called “Chai Labs,” the startup which was co-established by a former Google AdSense exec Gokul Rajaram, and lends a hand to other firm build search-friendly websites revolves around specific topics for around $10 million, reports Kara Swisher over at All Things Digital.
The All Things Digital blog BoomTown discovered about the acquisition from “several sources” but could not authenticate how much Facebook is shelling out for the purchase of the content-focused start-up, but it is likely to be around $10 million. Though BoomTown also asserts that the acquisition was mainly made for Chai Labs’ talent, not necessarily for its products or services.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based Chai Labs, which was established by an ex-Google AdSense executive named Gokul Rajaram, raised $1.1 million in funding last year, according to a regulatory filing, and $1.3 million before that, and its advisory board and investors include Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen, LinkedIn Chairman and PayPal alum Reid Hoffman and Google Ventures partner Joe Kraus, who was previously CEO of JotSpot,
The company’s website claims that NBC Local, Associated Content and the Travel Ad Network are among its clients.
While the company describes itself as a one-stop “technology platform that allows publishers to easily customize and launch scalable, search-friendly sites in several verticals, as Chai Labs is a bit more centered on launching new editorial properties, due to a callout at journalists on the company’s solutions page.
According to its Web site promo that states: “We seamlessly complement our partners’ editorial teams, and some of our most compelling implementations have occurred when editors and journalists have worked side-by-side with our platform.” Its customers include NBC Local, Yahoo’s Associated Content and the Travel Ad Network.
There are a lot of web publishing companies out there, but Chai Labs core platform consists of two different legs. The first is structured content extraction, which the company culls from stores of “unstructured or loosely organized” data sources and transforms into more manageable, accessible repositories of information. These ultimately serve as the brains for a given site’s core mission.
Second, Chai Labs, “employs proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies to analyze and extract insights from millions of real-time data points across the web,” or semantic search, which it claims make it very easy for consumers of editorial content to find information within a specific vertical like travel or local news. This information best helps companies make key purchasing decisions by eliminating the need to sift through complex–and seemingly unending–sources of information across the Web.
However, the ability to assist publishers create, store and deliver content is something that makes sense for Facebook, however, we are not sure how Facebook plans to employ the expertise that went into this service since the social networking site has been trying to work with media companies rather than compete with them.
Facebook is about to hit $1.285 billion in global advertising sales this year, reports eMarketer, and the company proclaims 16.8 percent of all advertising impressions in the United States. That number is double the take for Facebook from last year’s $665 million.
Furthermore, it will be interesting to see how ex-Googler Rajaram’s presence under Facebook’s wing contributes to the company’s advertising workhorse in the future.
Other recent purchases by Facebook included photo sharing service DivvyShot, local reference service NextStop and Sharegrove, a platform for distributing content and messages in real-time.
Facebook declined to comment and Chai Labs has not responded to an email query.