• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 6, 2014

Walmart's innovation lab and research and development center, @WalmartLabs, has made its 12th acquisition with Adchemy. The latest acquisition, among the largest in terms of headcount, highlights the importance of on-site search. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Through the acquisition, the company acquires more than 60 talented technologists from the product search company Adchemy. They will join Walmart Global eCommerce, adding critical engineering and analytics expertise to teams in various areas, including search, data analytics and marketing. Adchemy founder and CEO Murthy Nukala will not join the new team.

Walmart is acquiring Adchemy for talent and several of technologies including Adchemy's expertise in semantic search, product search, relevance, ad targeting tools and analytics, per a spokesperson.

Adchemy was founded in 2004 in Foster City, Calif. Over the years, it has built an "impressive team" that will help Walmart transform the shopping experience for millions of shoppers, explains Jeremy King, SVP and CTO at @WalmartLabs.

Walmart Global eCommerce has been building an Internet tech company inside the world’s largest retailer, known for forging new paths with technology. In addition to Target, Walmart was one of the first retailers to use radio frequency identification technology to track the movement of consumer product goods from supplier warehouses to its distribution center and onto store floors.

Among the team joining @WalmartLabs are Rohit Deep, former vice president of engineering and chief architect and engineering Lead at WebEx; Ethan Batraski, who served as vice president of products, formerly the head of search innovation at Yahoo; and data scientist Esteban Arcaute, head of research, who holds a PhD from Stanford and also worked at Yahoo.

@WalmartLabs has hired more than 1,000 associates during the past year, with many gained through acquisitions. The company's internal search engine, built by the Kosmix team, took nine months. It led to a 20% increase in search conversion. Inkiru technology was integrated within four months after the team joined. Today, their predictive analytics platform is applied to 100% of its transactions, per the company.