• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, February 23, 2017

Aiming to take on Facebook and Google, content recommendation platform Revcontent on Thursday said it acquired machine learning firm Rover, known for its personalization and recommendation technology, for more than $30 million.

Revcontent said the combo makes sense since they share a vision of a personalized Web in which users can easily discover content they love that they never knew existed.

Jonathan Siddharth, CEO of Rover, told Real-Time Daily via email: “Rover and Revcontent share a common vision for the future of the Web and media. We want to to use machine learning to do for discovery, what Google did for Web search. We’re making discovery more relevant and more personalized with the user at the forefront.”

Siddharth and his co-founder Vijay Krishnan started Rover while they were graduate students at Stanford University. Rover's machine learning technology was developed over years of research and development. Rover raised $7 million from Silicon Valley investors, from artificial intelligence (AI) backers and media investors.

John Lemp, CEO of Revcontent, told Real-Time Daily via email: "Our artificial intelligence for content recommendation is the first step to a more intelligent world around us, a world where this intelligence can lend itself to robotics and other systems.”

Revcontent clamed that Rover’s machine learning technology combined with Revcontent’s personalization features will make the company’s offering 10x more precise than competitors, and 3x more granular than Facebook. The acquisition of Rover’s machine learning recommendation technology will allow Revcontent’s media partners, such as Forbes, The Atlantic, and Newsweek, to build deeper relationships with their users, learning more about their true tastes and preferences, so they can create more of the content their users enjoy.

Rover expects to increase recommendation engine performance substantially, resulting in more revenue opportunities for publishers by delivering higher eCPMs, greater performance for advertisers, and more relevant and discoverable content for consumers.