Relegence is the newest wholly owned subsidiary of AOL following a deal that was signed and closed Monday. No terms were disclosed but Relegence, founded in privately held until now, has 60 employees and proprietary technology called the KnowledgeHub that can be integrated with AOL so likely didn’t come cheap. Relegence’s real-time “intelligence automation” monitors, indexes and filters more than 20,000 sources of live content streams and delivers desktop results. It also can integrate internal and external content streams. Relegence fits in with AOL’s efforts to develop and deploy its own publishing and content management system, which falls under Jim Bankoff, EVP-consumer and publisher services. Bankoff in the announcement of AOL’s fifth acquisition this year: “We’re confident that Relegence will bring a scalable and differentiated approach to serving AOL users, while existing institutional customers will continue to be well-served by their innovative technology and capabilities.” Release.
—Edo Segal founded the company in 1999 and has been chairman and CTO; Steve Fadem is the CEO. Relegence will continue to be based in New York with offices in London and Tel Aviv.
Rafat adds: This is a curious acquisition by AOL…Relegence is a Wall Street tool, aimed at hard core trading audiences, so the acquisition is aimed mainly at acquiring the technology and talent, not necessarily with an intent to go after the financial audience in a big way. Would be interesting to see how the data/subscription business develops under AOL.
Also, MarketWatch reports that Israeli business daily Globes pegs the purchase the price at $55 million to $65 million, while the Marker, the business Website of the daily Ha’aretz, said the range was $50 million to $100 million.