LinkedIn announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Bright, a data-focused job search service, for $120 million. The deal marks LinkedIn's largest acquisition yet.
Bright launched in 2010 and used data science to match up job seekers with employers. The service analyzed thousands of data points from resumes and job listings to come up with a Bright Score that indicated how good a match users are for particular jobs.
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"We're trying to map every skill to every job to every occupation clarification to every job function to every company," Steve Goodman, CEO of Bright, told Mashable in an interview after its most recent round of funding in September.
At the time, Goodman expressed concern that LinkedIn would try to "replicate" its technology.
"We have a working relationship with LinkedIn," he said. "I don't believe they are doing it today, but I wouldn't be surprised... I am worried about them replicating the technology over a three to five year period."
Now, the two companies can work together to bring those tools to the larger LinkedIn community. "By leveraging Bright's data-driven matching technology, machine-learning algorithms and domain expertise, we can accelerate our efforts and build out the Economic Graph," Deep Nishar, SVP of products and user experience at LinkedIn, said in a statement.
Bright had raised $20 million in funding to date.
LinkedIn's other major acquisitions include Slideshare, a presentation sharing platform, for $119 million and Pulse, a news reader app, for $90 million.
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