May 7, 2014

Walmart Labs acquires Adchemy

It was announced recently that Walmart Labs has acquired Adchemy, an e-commerce and product search company. The acquisition strategy is to acquire talent through Adchemy's team of more than 60 employees. 

Adchemy is a company based in California that specializes in product searching and focuses on ad targeting. According to TechCrunch, Walmart has added 6 million products to its website in the past year. As they plan to continue to add millions of new products, enhancing product search capabilities will help Walmart better target customers and compete with the other large e-commerce retailers like Amazon.

Walmart receives 245 million customers per week, and it is essential for the company to have ways to reach this large customer base. According to the Walmart Labs website, the acquisition of Adchemy will help the company to improve in the areas of marketing, semantic search and data analytics. The Adchemy team will help the company improve its e-commerce capabilities.

"They built an incredibly strong team of talented folks who understood product search, product relevance, SEO, SEM, and data scientists and Ph.D's who could build this technology," Jeremy King of Walmart Labs told TechCrunch. 

Walmart Labs, which currently has around 2,100 employees, is responsible for working on the company's e-commerce technology. By acquiring Adchemy, they look to add talent to their team comprised of engineers, including some who previously worked for companies like Yahoo and WebEx. The company has hired 1,000 employees over the course of the last year, according to ZDNet.

The acquisition is an effort to compete with Amazon. In another recent move in the world of online shopping, Google recently acquired Rangespan to enhance its online shopping capabilities.This is the 12th acquisition for Walmart Labs. Other acquisitions over the last several years have included Kosmix, Small Society and Tasty Labs, to name a few. The terms of the Adchemy deal were not disclosed.