Yahoo Spins Out Vespa, Its Enterprise AI-Scaling Engine, as an Independent Company

Leveraged By the World’s Leading Tech and Financial Services Companies; Yahoo To Remain Largest Customer and Investor

Yahoo announced the spin-out of Vespa, its platform for applications that leverage AI and data online at scale, as a separate and independent entity to broaden accessibility of its technology platform. As part of Yahoo, external customers such as Spotify, Wix, major financial institutions, and more, have turned to Vespa since 2017 for a variety of AI needs – from searching millions of documents within a global organization, serving better data-driven online ads, or allowing AI-based language apps the ability to scale.

“While remaining Vespa’s biggest customer and a key investor, we’ll continue to leverage all that Vespa has to offer while simultaneously creating a new business opportunity that allows other companies to harness its technology as an independent entity.”

Vespa will continue powering Yahoo’s internal solutions across search and dynamic recommendations as well as enabling personalized content and ads to users. As part of the spin-out, Yahoo will continue to invest in Vespa and remain its largest customer.

“Vespa has been a critical component to Yahoo’s AI and machine learning capabilities across all of our properties for many years,” said Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo. “While remaining Vespa’s biggest customer and a key investor, we’ll continue to leverage all that Vespa has to offer while simultaneously creating a new business opportunity that allows other companies to harness its technology as an independent entity.”

Vespa’s technology currently underpins an impressive and diverse portfolio of approximately 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.

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“Given Yahoo’s incubation and advancement of the technology over the years, now is the time to spin out Vespa and allow other companies to take advantage of Vespa Cloud in a meaningful way,” said Jon Bratseth, CEO at Vespa. “With Yahoo’s continued investment and support, Vespa will be able to maintain its position as one of the largest and most sophisticated machine learning and database management platforms globally.”

Originating as a pioneering search engine in 1997, Vespa became part of Yahoo through the Overture deal 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.

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