Facebook Buys Startup Chai Labs
Social networking Web site seems keen on Chai Labs talent
Facebook, the social networking Web site, has reportedly purchased startup Chai Labs for around $10 million. Facebook seems more intent on acquiring talent rather than technology. Gokul Rajaram, who was formerly known as Google's "godfather of Adsense," founded the company in 2007.
It is not known what the stealth startup does. Chai Labs is selling itself as a one-stop shop for customizing and launching search-friendly Web sites. However, it appears that the company is more involved on the launch of new editorial properties. This is due to a call for journalists on the company's Web site.
Chai Lab's core platform consists of structured content extraction, which the company poaches from clusters of "unstructured or loosely organized" data sources. The company transforms this into more manageable and accessible repositories of information. The information then serves as the knowledge behind any site's core mission.
Chai Labs also "uses proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies to analyze and extract insights from millions of real-time data points across the web." The data helps companies make key purchasing decisions. The information eliminates the need to search through complex and seemingly unending sources of information across the Internet.
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape Communications, Reid Hoffman, chairman of LinkedIn and Joe Kraus of Google Ventures, are all prominent investors in the company. Chai Labs raised a total of $2.4 million in funding prior to its acquisition.
EMarketer reports that Facebook is set to post $1.285 billion in global advertising sales this year. The report also shows that 16.8 percent of all advertising impressions are in the United States. The reports finds that the social networking Web site has double its earnings from the $665 million it made last year.