Wal-Mart Acquires Product Search Firm Adchemy

Walmart.com welcomed 60 new employees this week from the acquisition of Adchemy, a product search company that was founded in 2004. WalmartLabs blogger Jeremy King notes that the Adchemy team adds talent in semantic search, data analytics and marketing.

“Walmart isn’t a retailer in Silicon Valley, we’re building an Internet technology company inside the world’s largest retailer. We are 2,100 strong and growing,” King noted in his May 6 blog entry.

Adchemy is WalmartLabs twelfth acquisition since Labs’ creation, and one of the largest to date in terms of people.

“This latest acquisition continues our quest to build best-in-class e-commerce capabilities in-house. We have been hiring highly-talented teams organically and are augmenting that by acquiring talent to build our own technologies that can scale with our global business,” King writes.

Among the talent joining WalmartLabs are Rohit Deep who was the vice president of engineering and Ethan Batraski who served as vice president of products, formerly the head of search innovation at Yahoo! and data scientist Esteban Arcaute, head of research, who holds a PhD from Stanford and also worked at Yahoo!.

King said WalmartLabs has hired nearly 1,000 new employees during the past year.

“The result of this approach is a highly-talented workforce delivering high-impact products. Our internal search engine, built by the Kosmix team, took only nine months to ship and led to a 20% increase in search conversion. Inkiru technology was integrated within four months after the team joined, and today their predictive analytics platform is applied to 100% of our transactions. Here’s a snapshot of the key acquisitions @WalmartLabs has made in the last three years: