Last August
we reported that
500px, the explosively popular Toronto-based photo-sharing platform, was ramping up, growing to eight staff members, up from just two. That, as it turns out, was just the beginning.
The company is now up to 22 staff members, and plans to grow to 30 or 40 by year's end. On top of that, 500px has just made its first acquisition, last week announcing it had entered into an agreement to purchase another Toronto company,
Algo Anywhere.
Algo is a young company—founded just 10 months ago—that has been working on applying academic research in artificial intelligence to real-world online environments. The first major tool they developed is called Recommender, a platform for providing personalized recommendations for customers on e-commerce and other sites. It's this expertise in personalizing a website user's experience that caught 500px's eye, says Oleg Gutsol, the company's CEO.
"Algo's technology was very attractive to us because it will allow us to greatly enhance the experience of our users on the 500px platform. We will be able to deliver better image search and discovery results, display more relevant content, personalize photo recommendations for browsing and purchase."
The financial details of the acquisition haven't been disclosed, but the deal does include job offers for Algo's staff. Algo's principals, Zach Aysan and Adam Gravitis, will become chief data scientist and chief software architect, respectively. 500px is also currently looking to hire a user experience designer and several software developers.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Oleg Gutsol, CEO, 500px