Russian tech media group Rambler & Co has acquired a 51% stake in RCO, a major software publisher and service provider in the field of computational linguistics and unstructured data analysis.
No details of the transaction were officially disclosed, but in an exchange with Kommersant Nikolai Davydov of Gagarin Capital estimated that it amounted to some 75 million rubles (approximately $1.25 million).
This acquisition will allow the group to enhance its online advertising activity using intellectual content analysis, reported Russian business daily Kommersant earlier this month.
Rambler & Co also intends to launch a new software technology to analyze media content in the Russian language Internet, the group’s deputy director Maxim Tadevosyan told Kommersant.
According to official data, RCO generated 38.6 million rubles in revenue in 2013 (approximately $1.22 million at that time’s exchange rate).
Rambler & Co was formed in 2013 following the merger of two important Internet groups, Rambler-Afisha and SUP media. The group controls a number of online media outlets, including Afisha.ru, Lenta.ru and Motor.ru, as well as contextual advertising service Begun. Rambler.ru used to be Russia’s leading search engine in the 1990s but now, with around 1% of the search market, Rambler positions itself as a media tech platform, aggregating content from 2,000 publishers across the country.
