digiMine buys data firm

BELLEVUE – Just past its first anniversary, Bellevue-based digiMine Inc. has acquired a Silicon Valley firm, CoRelation Inc.

Like digiMine, 2-year-old CoRelation, which employs 12 is a pioneer in “data mining.” It’s a field in which companies crunch marketing, product, Web site and other statistics to provide businesses with highly detailed reports for making decisions.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. According to digiMine spokesman Joel Sider, the purchase gives the firm  which was started last March by three ex-Microsoft executives – new outposts at CoRelation’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., and another small office in Chicago.

CoRelation’s technical team – a group of five researchers that includes several Ph.Ds from Stanford University – will join more than 100 employees at digiMine’s  new downtown Bellevue offices.

On March 1, digiMine moved into 19,00 square feet at Bellevue Place, more than doubling the space it had at a previous location in Kirkland.

The deal also adds six CoRelation customers to the 30 digiMine currently has. The additions include online bookseller barnesandnoble.com, which uses CoRelation’s patent-pending search engine technology to suggest book titles to customers.

Sider and CoRelation’s focus on data customization and recommendation is a good complement to digiMine’s deep statistical analysis.

“They’re experts in this stuff,” Sider said of CoRelation. “It’s a great match.”

Since its founding, digiMine has raised $25 million in two rounds of funding.

The company was started by ex-Microsofties Nick Besbeas, Bassel Ojjeh and digiMine’s chairman and chief executive officer, Usama Fayyad, who started and spent five years in Microsoft’s data mining group.

DigiMine’s backers include the Mayfield Fund, Second Avenue Partners, Deutsche Bank Technology Fund, Cedar Grove Investments and Kellett Investments.

By: Cydney Gillis

Source: Eastside Business Journal / PDF

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