Sold! Walmart snaps up Indian-American shopping start-up for $300 m

Wal-Mart Stores, announced on Monday that it had signed an agreement to acquirea social media start-up called Kosmix, founded by online shopping innovators Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman. The Silicon Valley-based duo are no strangers to the e-commerce space; Junglee, a company they founded, was bought by Amazon in 1998 for $250 million.

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In acquiring Kosmix for a reported $300 million, the world’s largest retailer is betting that tomorrow’s shoppers will rely heavily on social media and cellphones when making their purchases. “We are expanding our capabilities in today’s rapidly growing social commerce environment,” Eduardo Castro-Wright, Walmart’s vice chairman, said in a statement. “Social networking and mobile applications are increasingly becoming a part of our customers’ day-to-day lives globally, influencing how they think about shopping, both online and in retail stores.”

On Datawocky, Rajaraman’s blog, he explains that Kosmix is based on the Social Genome platform, which analyses social media interactions by examining references to people, places, topics, produces, and events:

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As we worked on the Social Genome platform, it became apparent to us that this platform could transform e-commerce by providing an unprecedented level of understanding about customers and products, going well beyond purchase data. The Social Genome enables us to take search, personalisation and recommendations to the next level… The first generation of e-commerce was about bringing the store to the web. The next generation will be about building integrated experiences that leverage the store, the web, and mobile, with social identity being the glue that binds the experience.

As part of the merger, Harinarayan and Rajaraman will join the newly-created @WalmartLabs unit, and will continue to be based in Silicon Valley. As they make the transition, it remains to be seen whether Harinarayan and Rajaraman will be able to preserve the corporate culture that they created at Kosmix, where employees are admonished to “ work hard, play hard.” To support the latter, Kosmix offered job perks such as free on-site massages and access to a fully stocked kitchen, electric scooters, Wii, foosball, and trek bicycles.