Intelius buys Spock

Bellevue-based Intelius has purchased the Silicon Valley people search engine Spock, according to a report in VentureBeat. VentureBeat confirmed the deal with Spock co-founder Jaideep Singh, though editor Matt Marshall didn't have a purchase price.

Marshall reports that Spock -- which had burned through $8 million -- attracts about 10 million unique visitors each month. 

Intelius competes against Seattle-based Whitepages.com in the people search arena.   

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Some controversy surrounds Intelius founder Naveen Jain, stemming from his days at InfoSpace duing the last boom. And Intelius has faced its share of legal disputes.

However Spock’s Singh says he checked the evidence, and found that “there’s nothing major there.” On the contrary, Singh said, he found the company’s business execution impressive, and that Jain was running it professionally. “It was the biggest fish, and has the strongest team in the business,” Singh said. He said Intelius is potentially on track to hit $1 billion in revenue within 3 years.

I have an email into Jain to find out more about the deal.

UPDATE: Ed Petersen, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Intelius, confirmed the acquisition but declined to elaborate on the purchase price. However, he did say that there were multiple bids for Spock and it was a hotly contested deal.

At the end of the day, Petersen said that the Spock team decided that Intelius had the best prospects. Intelius was attracted to Spock because of its expertise in managing unstructured data that resides in blogs and social networking sites.

"They pull it and parse it and index it in a very compelling way," said Petersen, adding that Intelius has expertise in structured data. "We believe the combination of the two solidifies us in the people search space."

And what about competition from Whitepages.com? 

"I really don't spend a lot of time thinking about them," said Petersen. While Intelius' Addresses.com business competes directly with Whitepages.com, Petersen said they've never lost a deal to them. He said Whitepages faces additional challenges given their reliance on online advertising.

The "overwhelming majority" of Spock's 20 employees will remain with Intelius, Petersen said.

Intelius also plans to maintain an office in Silicon Valley, with Petersen saying the staff will be moving to a new office space. With the acquisition, Intelius now employs about 225 people.

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