Reddit’s takeover spree continues this morning News that the company provides the company with audience contextualization Spiketrap technology in-house. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Reddit says Spiketrap’s contextual analysis and AI-powered tools will lend a hand Reddit improve areas such as ad quality ratings and improve predictive models for automated bidding.
The deal signals Reddit’s growing investment in its advertising business as it aims to make it easier for advertisers to reach the right audiences based on interests. This deal also comes as Apple’s consumer privacy tools, App Tracking Transparency (ATT), impact the performance of online advertising on major technology platforms such as Facebook AND Snapas consumers abandon ad personalization.
Founded According to its website in 2016, Kieran Seán Fitzpatrick, Virgilio Pigliucci and Andrea Vattani San Francisco-based Spiketrap has more than 20 employees. The company touts its proprietary Clair AI technology, which is capable of extracting the “signal from the noise” of unstructured data sets. In conjunction with the Knowledge Graph, the company offers a range of solutions for contextual ad targeting, impact measurement, brand safety monitoring, and other research and data-as-a-service solutions.
In particular, it promotes technology that can, for example, determine which entities certain content may refer to, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in areas such as movies, TV shows, games, franchises and more. As the company notes, this artificial intelligence deals with ambiguities, abbreviations and acronyms. Meanwhile, its emotion AI is also able to detect sentiments around a post, such as excitement, sarcasm, or toxicity – the latter of which Reddit has struggled with for years and has often had to shut down hateful and deplorable subreddits that engage in harassment and others that advertisers would like avoid. He recently blocked the r/donaldtrump subreddit following the January 6 riots.
“The richness of conversations in over 100,000 lively communities is what makes Reddit so unique and so valuable to advertisers. We believe that targeting the right audiences based on interests and the context of the conversations they’re engaged in helps advertisers reach the right people in the most effective way,” said Shariq Rizvi, Reddit’s vice president of ad monetization statement about the contract. “We have been actively investing in solutions in this space for some time, and this acquisition will complement Reddit’s capabilities and take them to the next level. I’m excited to welcome the Spiketrap team to the Reddit family,” Rizvi added.
Today’s announcement follows Reddit’s other recent acquisitions, including Spell, a machine learning experimentation platform, in June and natural language processing company MeaningCloud in July. In the case of the former, Reddit could exploit ML technology to improve its capabilities in a number of areas – such as recommendations for the newer Discover tab, as well as security and targeted advertising efforts. MeaningCloud, like Spiketrap, has also promoted its ability to extract meaning from unstructured content, suggesting that Reddit has broader goals of rapidly making improvements in this area, particularly in relation to its ability to serve advertisers.
Reddit says a 15-person Spiketrap team has already joined the company and will lead multiple projects in its advertising industry in the future. Reddit is currently focused on combining Spiketrap’s tools, technologies and resources with Reddit, and a strategy to continue to grow its commercial operations will be part of this transition, the company notes.
“Our goal has always been to contextualize language at scale and in real time to help creators, brands and platforms truly understand and meaningfully engage their audiences,” Kieran Fitzpatrick, CEO and co-founder of Spiketrap, said in the announcement. “We look forward to continuing to scale these efforts across Reddit.”
Spiketrap raised $3.5 million in a seed round in 2020 but did not disclose a valuation, a Reddit spokesperson confirmed. Spiketrap’s seeding round was led by Susa, 645, Pathbreaker and Anorak. Following the acquisition, the Spiketrap team will take on senior roles within Reddit’s product and engineering organization, with existing Spiketrap CEO and co-founder Kieran Fitzpatrick joining as chief product officer.