Google has acquired the personalized-news startup Wavii for more than $30 million in response to Yahoo's recent acquisition of a similar app, according to a report on Tuesday.
Google's successful bid came after Apple had also expressed interest in buying Wavii to incorporate the startup's natural language technology into Siri, Apple's voice-activated personal assistant feature, a source familiar with the matter told Techcrunch.
Google's purchase comes several weeks after Yahoo Inc paid a similar amount to acquire Summly, the news reader and Wavii competitor founded by 18-year-old Nick D'Aloisio in London. Yahoo rolled out the new iOS app which integrates Summly's technology on Monday.
Wavii, which has around 25 employees, created a "knowledge graph," a database of hundreds of millions of "entities"-people, places and thing-and an understanding of how they are related to each other. The product is expected to be incorporated into Google's web search functionality.
According to Wavii, which launched publicly a year ago, it offers users a "personalized news feed" that can provides them with a summary of the most important news related to anything they care about, such as people, countries, companies and other topics, including hail storms and sports teams.
"We do it by teaching computers to read everything that is reported or shared on the internet, and automatically produce interesting social content about it," the company says on its website.
Wavii was founded in 2009 and raised more than $2 million in seed funding at the time of acquisition from funders including Felicis Investments, SV Angel, CrunchFund, Mitch Kapor, Max Levchin, and others, according to CrunchBase.
