Seattle-based Evri, a Web startup focused on semantic search and discovery, announced today it has acquired San Francisco-based Radar Networks, the maker of Twine.com. Financial terms weren’t given, but both companies are backed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital. Radar Networks is also backed by Fuse Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and angel investors.
This is big news in the emerging semantic search sector, where companies are using advanced algorithms to understand content on the Web and connections between online entities like people, places, and products. Twine is well known for giving consumers a way to find and organize information online, and share it with people they trust. In the merger, Evri is gaining Twine’s development team, which is being consolidated in Evri’s San Francisco offices, where CEO Will Hunsinger is based.
Evri has also redesigned its website to be more intuitive for consumers. It’s an interesting evolution for a company that was incubated by Vulcan in 2007 and has mainly focused on partnerships with media organizations such as the Washington Post, The Times of London, and Hearst, helping their readers find related content and browse for information.
“We’re striving to deliver a search engine that proactively discovers the most interesting, popular and trending stories on the Web, filtering out the clutter and delivering information to consumers in timely, relevant and intelligent streams,” Hunsinger said in a statement. “With the acquisition of Twine and the launch of our new consumer site, we’re making good on the intuitive discovery experience we envision for the Web.”
