This article was published on January 15, 2013

YuMe acquires venture-backed audience targeting technology firm Crowd Science


YuMe acquires venture-backed audience targeting technology firm Crowd Science

Digital brand advertising software and services provider YuMe today announced its acquisition of Crowd Science, an audience targeting technology company with offices in Silicon Valley, New York and Toronto.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Backed by $2 million from Granite Ventures (raised in late 2007), Crowd Science had developed an audience measurement and targeting platform dubbed CITRUS, which combines survey, behavioral and contextual data using proprietary machine learning techniques.

In four years of operation, Crowd Science is said to have generated more than 850 brand-focused audience segments across 165 million+ unique users, leading to today’s purchase of the company by YuMe.

YuMe argues that Crowd Science’s platform builds on the capabilities of Audience Amplifier, which the former company employs to enhance audience reach and targeting across video devices.

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Jayant Kadambi, co-founder and CEO of YuMe, puts it this way:

“We’ve been laser-focused on enhancing audience measurement, modeling and targeting, and Crowd Science will be the perfect complement to our data science group that’s been driving that effort.

Crowd Science technology allows us to significantly improve our audience reach, measurement and segmentation capabilities.”

That, and the fact that YuMe is adding a lot of experience and talent to the fold with the move, leads us to believe this concerned a sizeable transaction. We’ve contacted YuMe to learn more.

FYI: YuMe is backed by just south of $73 million in VC funding from the likes of Accel Partners, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung Ventures and DAG Ventures.

Image credit: Thinkstock

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