• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, October 4, 2023

Yahoo today announced the spinout of its enterprise AI-scaling engine Vespa as a separate and independent company. It will continue to invest in Vespa and remain its largest customer. 

Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo, called Vespa a “critical component” to Yahoo’s AI and machine-learning capabilities across all of its properties for many years.

Vespa's technology underpins 150 applications that are integral to the company’s operations. These applications play a pivotal role in delivering personalized content across all of Yahoo’s pages in real-time and effectively managing targeted advertisements within one of the world's largest ad exchanges.

Collectively, these applications serve an impressive user base of nearly one billion individuals processing a staggering 800,000 queries per second. 

The spinout aims to broaden accessibility of Vespa’s technology platform at a time when the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) processing power required for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

Yahoo will remain Vespa’s largest customer and strategic investor, with roughly 150 technology applications that deliver personalized content across all Yahoo pages and manage targeted ads, serving nearly one billion individuals.

Customers including Spotify, Wix and major financial institutions since 2017 have used Vespa’s AI to search millions of documents within a global organization, serve better data-driven online ads, and allow AI-based language apps the ability to scale.

Vespa also will continue to power Yahoo’s internal solutions across search and dynamic recommendations as well as enabling personalized content and ads to users as part of the spinout.

Vespa, founded as a search engine in 1997, became part of Yahoo through the Overture acquisition in 2003. Vespa open sourced in 2017 and began servicing external customers in 2021. Yahoo will own a stake in the new entity and also hold a seat on its board of directors.