Walmart Labs is an Americansubsidiary of Walmart in San Bruno, California. Their website earns revenue from advertising related to its categorization engine. The engine organizes the Internet into topic pages allowing users to explore the Web by topic, "presenting a dashboard of relevant videos, photos, news, commentary, opinion, communities and links to related topics". Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman founded Kosmix in 2005. In April 2011, Walmart acquired Kosmix and formed @WalmartLabs, a research division, out of it.
History
Kosmix
Harinarayan and Rajaraman were co-founders of Junglee, the first shopping search engine which was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. They later created Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk and started an early-stage VC fund, Cambrian Ventures, that backed several companies later acquired by Google.
Financing
The first funding for Kosmix of 7 million was secured from Lightspeed Venture Partners in November 2005. Their second round of 18 million from Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners was announced in 2006 followed by a third round of 10 million on behalf of Accel Partners, DAG Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners. A fourth round of funding was secured in December 2008 in the amount of 20 million from Time Warner Investments, Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, DAG Partners and former Motorola CEO Ed Zander. Amazon's Jeff Bezos is also an investor, through Bezos Expeditions. Kosmix initially introduced health site RightHealth, a vertical search engine, to demonstrate their approach to Web navigation. Kosmix expanded its focus from vertical to a horizontal search engine in June 2008, covering all subjects. For a key word or topic that a user enters, "Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. The company has built a taxonomy of nearly five million categories on a wide range of topics. The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories."
Growth
In June 2007, Kosmix announced a partnership with Revolution Health, in which Revolution Health will utilize Kosmix to enhance content searches on RevolutionHealth.com. Truveo announced in September 2007 that the company's video search engine is being used by Kosmix to present topic-relevant videos on its health site RightHealth, giving users a starting point to explore health topics. As of March 2008, Kosmix' market-share had grown 730% year-over-year. RightHealth was the #2 health site on the Web, according to Hitwise. Kosmix launched a personalnews site called MeeHive in March, 2008 which is similar to Google News or MyYahoo!, but allows users to customize their interests to a greater degree. Meehive was shut down in October 2010. Kosmix launched tweetbeat in June 2010 as it entered the social media arena. In October 2009, Kosmix acquired Cruxlux, an engine designed to take any two people, places, or things and tell the user how they are connected. Cruxlux was founded in 2007 by Guha Jayachandran and Curtis Spencer and was in private beta at the time of the acquisition. The terms of the deal are mostly unknown, other than that it was made in both cash and stock. In April 2011, Kosmix announced a partnership with Ask The Doctor, in which their website AskTheDoctor.com would provide Q & A format medical content for Kosmix's website RightHealth.
Acquisition by Walmart
Kosmix was acquired by Walmart in April/May 2011 and became @WalmartLabs for a rumored amount of $300 million. In June 2012, Harinarayan and Rajaraman announced that they would be leaving the company to take some time off, with no immediate plans. In June 2013, Walmart bought predictive intelligence startup Inkiru to add analytics capabilities. In June 2018, Walmart announced it would hire 2,000 additional employees into Walmart Labs to improve the company's online grocery shopping platform. In July 2019, it acquired health tech startup FloCare and B2B wholesale trading platform BigTrade to bolster its customer service.
