Adience, founded 18 months ago, today announced that it had been acquired by the Teddy Sagi group. Sources inform "Globes" that the price was $20 million. Adience operates in the mobile applications market, in which Sagi is trying to get as big a foothold as possible. The company has developed a system for managing mobile user applications, based on deep learning technology. The purpose of this technology is to understand the user's needs, which are becoming more complex with time and the increase in the mass of information on the Internet. Adience's solution generates a user profile, which helps mobile advertising agencies and their customers improve their offerings to users of their applications, thereby upgrading the user experience and maintaining their loyalty to the application as much as possible.
Adience, a very young company, has only 10 employees in its Tel Aviv offices, so the $20 million value generated by its founders is quite considerable. The company was founded by three veterans of the IDF 8200 Intelligence Corps unit: CPO Sasha Medvedovsky, CTO Eran Eidinger, and CEO Roee Nahir. According to the Registrar of Companies, each of the three owns 19.6% of Adience, while the largest financial shareholder in the company is Magma Venture Partners (7.7%). It is believed that Adience has raised $1.6 million since it was founded, which means that its shareholders have made a return of 13 times on their money.
Nahir said, "We are excited and glad to join Teddy Sagi's group of companies. We have developed an amazing technology, and we, together with and through the group, can bring it to the biggest market - the e-commerce market - in a shorter time."
Sagi's still-private e-commerce activity is growing, and Adience is expected to constitute the technological base for it. In this framework, the company will take part in developing the e-commerce of Camden Market, the popular UK shopping forum owned by Sagi, which held its IPO on the AIM UK stock exchange only last week at a valuation of $1.2 billion. In order to perform this task, Adience will open offices in the UK, Germany, and other European countries. The company's R&D unit will continue operating from Israel, and is expected to triple its staff in the first stage, according to Adience's announcement.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on December 25, 2014
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