For a company that was founded back in late 2002, LinkedIn has been notoriously inactive on the acquisition front to date. This year, that changed with the purchase of recommendation technology company mSpoke. And now, almost 6 weeks after that announcement, the business social networking company says it has made a second acquisition.
LinkedIn is buying San Francisco-based ChoiceVendor, a startup that provides ratings and reviews of B2B service providers in more than 70 categories across the United States.
Like with the mSpoke purchase, financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
From the sound of it, LinkedIn is buying the company mostly for its team. At least that’s what I read in LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner‘s supporting quote:
“Our acquisition of ChoiceVendor is right in line with our top priority to build a world-class team at LinkedIn. We’ve admired the work that Yan-David, Rama, and the talented ChoiceVendor team have done for some time now and are excited to have them join us, especially given their highly relevant work experience.”
Yan-David being ChoiceVendor co-founder and chief exec Yan-David Erlich, and Rama being VP of Engineering Rama Ranganath.
Prior to founding ChoiceVendor, Elrich was an entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures and the founder and CEO of Mogad / Social.IM which was acquired by iSkoot in 2008. Previously, he also held software engineering and product management roles at Microsoft and Google.
Rama Ranganath was at Google before co-founding ChoiceVendor, where he was an early engineer on the AdSense team and eventually managed several teams including the Google Ad Manager team. Prior to that, Rama worked at Microsoft.
According to a notice on the ChoiceVendor website, the just-acquired company is ceasing operations, effectively immediately.
LinkedIn says it currently boasts more than 75 million members globally and expects to have 900 employees by the end of this year. The company has long been rumored to prepare for an IPO, but to date has not confirmed plans to do so in the immediate future.
(Via BusinessWeek)