Facebook has been on somewhat of a small company acquisition spree as of late, looking to acquire those companies which will help Facebook expand their talented engineer base. Chai Labs is a small, Silicon Valley-based, company with a pretty killer investor and advisory board including Marc Andreessen, Reid Hoffman (Chairman of LinkedIn), and Joe Kraus of Google Ventures. What the company does exactly is not quite clear, however according to Kara Swisher the company previously raised $2.4 million in funding.
The most significant value-add could be related to the semantic search platform that Chai Labs was building. Given that Facebook’s Open Graph search is essentially a semantic search engine, Facebook could simply be looking to ramp up the company’s internal search team. This acquisition follows a number of other small acquisitions including Parakey, FriendFeed, Octazen strategies, DivvyShot, and NextStop.
The amount of the acquisition was reportedly $10 million. It will be interesting to see how Chai Labs becomes integrated into Facebook. While the DivvyShot acquisition has already yielded a number of improvements to the Facebook Photos application, it may take longer before we see the impact of the Chai Labs acquisition.