LinkedIn announced today that it has acquired Newsle, the machine-learning startup founded to help users pare down the ample noise coming across social networks and give them relevant info about their most important contacts. The terms of the acquisition were not announced, but LinkedIn says that Newsle will continue to operate as a standalone product for the time being, while both teams work to integrate the startup’s tech into LinkedIn proper.
Newsle’s entire team of engineers, including four employees, will be heading to LinkedIn along with founders Jonah Varon and Axel Hansen. Newsle’s product scans the web to find blogs and articles that mention specific people and then returns results, including blog posts and articles from the web that are relevant to those connections. Notifications about new posts happen almost in real time, and the startup has put a lot of time and effort into building natural language processing and disambiguation algorithms to make sure it’s bringing back the right kind of content.
Newsle was founded in January 2011 and has raised a total of $2.6 million from investors, including Transmedia Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.
While the two companies say Newsle will continue to operate as a standalone product for now, it’s worth noting that with previous acquisition CardMunch, LinkedIn operated it separately for a few years before finally announcing it would shutter the standalone app this year.
