San Francisco, US, June 21, 2018 — In order to provide a better user experience Twitter has today announced the acquisition of Smyte with all their assets and IP. As part of the acquisition process, Smyte will close their business. The financial details of the transaction have not been disclosed. Until today, Smyte managed to gather a funding of $6.3m through three investment rounds.
What was Smyte about?
Smyte was founded by Josh Yudaken, Julian Tempelsman, and Pete Hunt. They’ve been working on technology to identify bad actors in marketplaces and social networks. The Smyte solution is able to classify information and report harmful activities such as spamming, harassment or other actions that harm the user and the platform itself.
As Smyte closes their business, they have now placed a little information and goodbye note on their website. As this is likely to disappear at some point in the future, we have taken a screenshot for you and placed it above. The link they are mentioning in the last line can be accessed here.
Twitter’s stance on things
There was not much noise on this acquisition, and except for a small entry in the Twitter Safety blog today, there was nobody who provided their commentary or thoughts on this news. In their post they confirmed the following facts:
“Smyte’s products will help us address challenges in safety, spam and security more quickly and effectively. Their review tools and processes will be powerful additions to our own tools and technology that help us keep Twitter safe. We’ll integrate this technology to strengthen our systems and operations in the coming months. The health of the conversation on Twitter remains our top priority and we’re looking forward to approaching this work with an expanded team and new technology.”
For Twitter, the reasoning behind this might or might not be pressure from various governing bodies to improve the safety and overall user experience on their social network. At this moment in time, there is no data that would back this up, but it’s a possibility.
Alternatives to Smyte emerging
As Smyte is closing their doors, their competitors are trying to get their name out into the crowd. Companies like Koko, who are known for their AI-powered community moderation, bid their farewell on Twitter and directly offered their services to any Smyte customers and prospects who might have been let down.
https://twitter.com/koko/status/1009825879109898240
Koko was founded by Fraser Kelton, Kareem Kouddous, and Robert R. Morris in 2014 and received a $2.5m funding by Union Square Ventures and Omidyar Network in 2016.
Photo credit: The feature image is owned by Twitter and was provided for press usage.
Source: Twitter Safety blog entry / Crunchbase
