Facebook Acquires Chai Labs, Gains 'Godfather of Google Adsense'

Facebook has snapped up startup Chai Labs for around $10 million, reports Kara Swisher over at All Things Digital. The move seems geared more toward acquiring talent than technology, as it's not quite clear what exactly the stealth startup—founded in 2007 by former Google "godfather of Adsense" Gokul Rajaram—actually does.

While the company bills itself as a one-stop shop for customizing and launching search-friendly Web sites, it appears that Chai Labs is a bit more focused on launching new editorial properties, due to a callout at journalists on the company's solutions page.

The company's core platform consists of two different legs. The first is structured content extraction, which the company culls from stores of "unstructured or loosely organized" data sources and transforms into more manageable, accessible repositories of information. These ultimately serve as the brains for a given site's core mission.

Second, Chai Labs, "uses proprietary crawling, artificial intelligence and data mining technologies to analyze and extract insights from millions of real-time data points across the web," or semantic search. This information best helps companies make key purchasing decisions by eliminating the need to sift through complex—and seemingly unending—sources of information across the Web.

Prominent investors in Chai Labs—which raised a total of $2.4 million in funding prior to its acquisition—include Silicon Valley's Marc Andreessen, co-cofounder of Netscape Communications, as well as LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman and Google Ventures' Joe Kraus.

Facebook's set to hit $1.285 billion in global advertising sales this year, reports eMarketer, and the company delivers 16.8 percent of all advertising impressions in the United States. That number is double the take for Facebook from last year's $665 million.

More importantly, it'll be interesting to see how ex-Googler Rajaram's presence under Facebook's wing contributes to the company's advertising workhorse in the future.