Deal evaluated at tens of millions of dollars
Israeli sells search engine to Twitter
Five years after selling Google his Orion algorithm, entrepreneur Ori Allon performs second exit. He will become Twitter's head of engineering and highest ranking Israeli in company
Israeli entrepreneur Ori Allon is selling his startup Julpan to Twitter, the two companies announced Wednesday evening. The deal is evaluated at tens of millions of dollars.
Allon's startup develops search engines for social networks which yield results based on users' regular activity rather than on search queries.
This is Allon's second exit. In 2006, when he was only 26 years old, he sold Google a search algorithm called Orion which he developed as part of his doctoral thesis.
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As part of the deal, Allon will be named head of engineering and will be in charge of Twitter's search engine. Julpan's headquarters in New York will become Twitter's activity center in the city. Calcalist reported on Julpan's activity in the beginning of August.
"With more than 230 million tweets a day on every conceivable topic, Twitter allows us to make a bigger contribution to connecting people to what interests them", wrote Allon in a post on Julpan's official blog.
"We are looking forward to joining forces with Twitter's development team to see how e can improve Julpan's innovativeness".
The announcement on the deal was released ahead of the Facebook developers' conference dubbed f8 that will open tomorrow. According to estimates, Facebook will reveal its new music and video service.
Julpan's technology will place Twitter in a better position to compete against Facebook and Google. This week, Google also announced several upgrades to its social network Google+.
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