eBay Completes the Acquisition of SalesPredict

UPDATE: eBay has completed the acquisition of SalesPredict, which leverages advanced analytics to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion.  SalesPredict will support eBay’s artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts, and their deep expertise will contribute to eBay’s structured data efforts.

The below posting was originally published on July 11th, 2016:

Today eBay announced it will acquire SalesPredict, an Israel-based company that leverages advanced analytics to predict customer buying behavior and sales conversion. SalesPredict is eBay’s latest acquisition that will support its artificial intelligence, machine learning and data science efforts.  It follows eBay’s recent acquisition of Expertmaker, in order to further bolster our structured data efforts.  Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Upon the close of the transaction, a number of SalesPredict’s employees will join eBay’s structured data organization, working from eBay’s Israeli Development Center in Netanya. SalesPredict Co-Founder and CEO Yaron Zakai-Or will serve as a Director of Product Management, Technology, and SalesPredict Co-Founder and CTO Kira Radinsky will be Director of Data Science & Chief Scientist, eBay Israel.

“Today’s agreement to acquire SalesPredict builds upon our recently completed acquisition of Expertmaker, marking another milestone for eBay in our plans to apply world class learning approaches to building the world’s most comprehensive product catalog and pricing guide,” said Amit Menipaz, Vice President and General Manager of Structured Data at eBay. “SalesPredict’s deep expertise in predictive analytics and machine learning will contribute to eBay’s structured data efforts.  For our buyers, it will help us better understand the price differentiating attributes of our products, and, for our sellers, it will help us build out the predictive models that can define the probability of selling a given product, at a given price over time. 

There are three key efforts that comprise eBay’s structured data initiative: collect the data; process and enrich the data; and create product experiences.  SalesPredict will contribute to data processing and enrichment, specifically with respect to inventory insights.

“With more than 900 million listings on eBay, there is an enormous opportunity to extend our experience in machine learning and predictive analytics to help eBay identify important product attributes that can affect the price of a product,” said Yaron Zakai-Or.  “In partnership with eBay’s broader structured data team, we will help arm eBay sellers with more information about the value of items, ultimately helping to increase customer sales conversions.”

“As a data scientist at heart, I’ve always been interested in exploring the myriad ways we can leverage data to predict future high impact events,” said Kira Radinsky.  “In founding SalesPredict, our vision was to bring about a major change in how business is conducted by unifying micro- and macro-economic predictions.  Today, this vision has yielded state-of-the-art automated data science capabilities. I am excited to have the opportunity to bring these capabilities to eBay’s community and ecosystem.”

SalesPredict was co-founded in 2012 by Yaron Zakai-Or and Kira Radinsky and its main investors include Yandex, AfterDox, Redline Capital, KGC Capital, and Pitango Venture Capital.  Prior to SalesPredict, Zakai-Or held various product management positions at Kontera, Microsoft and Quiver. Radinsky is a graduate of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.  She was recognized by Forbes in 2015 as one of "30 Under 30 in Enterprise Tech" and was named to the prestigious “35 Young Innovators Under 35” by the MIT Technology Review in 2013. in 2014, Forbes named her one of the “50 Most Influential Women in Israel.”