Facebook has acquired Mountain View, California-based personalized online shopping search engine, TheFind. The announcement of acquisition was made on Friday but the details of deal were kept undisclosed.
Announcing the deal, Facebook said “TheFind’s talented team has built a successful search engine that connects people to products. Together, we believe we can make the Facebook ads experience even more relevant and better for consumers”.
“Our business is about connecting people with the topics, companies, brands, and increasingly products they care about and we look forward to doing that with TheFind on board.”
Founded in 2006 by CEO Siva Kumar and CTO Shashikant Khandelwal, the shopping search site allows online shoppers to search hundreds of different sites for particular products at once. The company claims its shopping index contains more than 500 million products from 500,000 stores.
The startup had previously raised at least $26 million in venture financing from Bain Capital Ventures, Cambrian Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures.
As part of the deal, many of TheFind’s employees will join Facebook to integrate the technology into the social network’s advertising platform. TheFind added that its search engine will be shutdown “in the next few weeks.”
“Unfortunately, this means we will be taking our search engine offline in the next few weeks,” it said.
It’s still unclear as how many of the startup’s employees will be laid off as a result of the buyout.
It is expected that Facebook would utilize the shopping search engine’s technology to add additional shopping tools to its service and lift its digital advertising business.
