RichRelevance Acquires Precog To Add Large-Scale Analytics Engine To E-Commerce Personalization Platform

RichRelevance, a company that powers personalized shopping experiences for online retailers, acquired Precog, an analytics technology startup (formerly known as ReportGrid). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Backed with $50 million in venture funding, RichRelevance aims to take consumer shopping data and help retailers leverage this information into a more personalized experience. As e-commerce continues to grow, and big data strategies enter the market, more retailers are providing customized online shopping for consumers to drive sales. In aggregate, RichRelevance’s clients represent more than 30 percent of online retail and include Target, Walmart, Sears, Overstock, The Disney Store and others.

As we wrote in the past, Precog is like a Heroku for apps that consume huge quantities of data from a diverse set of services in order to provide users with insight and intelligence. Specific to retail, Precog’s data-analysis engine allows companies to store, integrate and analyze large volumes of modern, semi-structured data.

As part of the acquisition, Precog’s CEO John De Goes, a noted software architect and graduate of Boulder’s 2011 TechStars, as well as Precog’s entire team of senior engineering leaders, have joined RichRelevance. Precog had previously raised $750,000 in funding.

RichRelevance’s CMO Diane Kegley explains that Precog’s technology is particularly compelling because it brings together multiple combinations of different types of data, structured and unstructured, into a single view. For retailers in particular, sites can use RichRelevance to cross-reference unstructured data, such as tweets, Facebook likes and others, about brands with structured data such as past purchases and click-throughs. “Retailers can start getting insights from unstructured data, which helps them make better decisions about their customer base and go to market strategies,” she says.

The announcement follows RichRelevance’s May 2013 acquisition of Sweden-based online merchandising company Avail.

RichRelevance has been at the forefront of helping retailers adopt personalization strategies. But personalization has gone beyond just sifting through structured data like purchase history. More retailers want to make sense of social data and more. Clearly, Precog will help RichRelevance be able to tap into this data and provide analytics based on this data to retailers.