I love the smell of acquisitions in the morning! We’ve just heard that Groupon has acquired Adku, a stealth startup that uses big data in order to personalize the online shopping experience for people visiting eCommerce sites like eBay, Amazon and Zappos.
The company built their personalized targeting technology in three months, and have basically been in stealth since they launched at the Angelpad Demo day a year and a half ago. Adku is backed by Greylock Partners, Battery Ventures and True Ventures in addition to being an Angelpad startup.
Although CEO Ajit Varma and several members of the six person team (including co-founders Carlos Whitt and Jesse Shieh) are former Googlers, from what I’m hearing this wasn’t a talent acquisition or acqhire but a team + technology play — with a price beyond $10 million. Varma would not disclose what the team will be working on when they get to Groupon.
While it’s not clear what the technology will be applied to, the acquisition makes sense on a lot of levels, especially because a personalized experience is where most of eCommerce is headed. Greylock VC David Thacker now runs product for Groupon, so that couldn’t have hurt either.
Wrote Varma in a blog post, “We started talking to Groupon to bring our technology to more customers and quickly realized that we wanted to be a deeper part of a company that people love and is empowering merchants and customers in a way that’s never been done before.”
Stay tuned!
https://twitter.com/#!/Scobleizer/status/2531559143903234
