Table of Contents
BRISBANE, Calif. — Walmart plans to buy Kosmix, a social media company focused on e-commerce.
Walmart plans to buy Kosmix, a social media company focused on e-commerce.
Terms of the deal for the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up weren’t disclosed. Walmart said Monday that Kosmix will operate as part of the newly formed @WalmartLabs and continue to be based in Silicon Valley.
The discount store giant noted that Kosmix has developed a social media platform that filters and organizes content in social networks to connect people with real-time information that matters to them.
The company’s technology platform searches and analyzes connections in real-time data streams to deliver highly personalized insights to users. The platform powers TweetBeat, a real-time social media filter for live events with more than 5 million visits last month; Kosmix.com, a site to discover social content by topic; and RightHealth, one of the top three health and medical information sites by global reach.
“We are expanding our capabilities in today’s rapidly growing social commerce environment,” Walmart vice chairman Eduardo Castro-Wright said in a statement. “Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores.”
Kosmix was founded by Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, early pioneers of online shopping, whose first company, Junglee, was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998.
Walmart said it expects the acquisition to close in the first half of this year.