Infochimps, a marketplace for data sets, is announcing the acquisition of Y Combinator-incubated startup and competitor Data Marketplace. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we understand it was an all-cash deal.
As we wrote in our initial review of Data Marketplace earlier this year, the startup served as a middleman in helping financial organizations find quality data on the web. Users could submit requests to Data Marketplace, and the site will send those requests to its database of 200,000 data aggregators, programmers, and consultants who specialize in finding financial data and essentially transferring it into a readable format.
Providers then post data resources to Data Marketplace, provide descriptive metadata, and also set a price. The stored metadata is used to help consumers find relevant data through traditional search engines and when browsing Data Marketplace. Data can also be posted on the site without a request, that users can search for.
Infochimps, which recently closed a $1.2 million financing round from DFJ Mercury, focused on providing smaller data sets for developers. Data ranges from content around academia, the enterprise, and more. The startup is also working on building a large-scale data stack capable of ingesting, analyzing and distributing TB scale databases.
Infochimps’ CEO Nick Ducoff tells us that the funding has been used for both the acquisition of Data Marketplace as well as for new hires, which include Kurt Bollacker, previously Chief Scientist at Metaweb (which was acquired by Google). Data Marketplace’s founders Steve DeWald and Matt Hodan will not be joining Infochimps as part of the acquisition but Data Marketplace will continue to operate as a standalone destination.
Infochimps helps businesses unlock the value of their data with unprecedented speed, scale and flexibility. The Infochimps Platform is an innovative managed cloud service that streamlines building and managing complex Big Data environments, and distills analytics to deliver actionable intelligence faster. With Infochimps, companies can feel confident that they have the fastest way to deploy Big Data environments in public, virtual private, or private clouds. Infochimps is a privately held, venture-backed company with offices in Austin, TX and the...
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