Qloo acquires cultural recommendation service TasteDive

Published February 13, 2019

Qloo announced this morning that it has acquired TasteDive.

The two companies sound pretty similar — according to the announcement, Qloo is “the leading artificial intelligence platform for culture and taste,” while TasteDive is “a cultural recommendation engine and social community.”

What’s the difference? Well TasteDive is a website where you can create a profile, connect with other users and, as you like and dislike things, it will recommend music, movies, TV shows, books and more. Qloo, meanwhile, is trying to understand patterns in consumer taste and then sell that data to marketers.

Or, as Qloo CEO Alex Elias (pictured above) put it in a statement, “TasteDive does for millions of individuals what Qloo has been doing for brands for years – using AI to make better decisions about culture and taste.”

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Apparently TasteDive has 4.5 million active users, and it will continue to operate as a separate team and product, with founder Andrei Oghina remaining on-board as CEO. (Elias will become chairman.)

At the same time, the companies say the addition of Qloo technology will allow TasteDive to get smarter and to expand into different categories, while Qloo benefits from TasteDive’s global customer base and its API ecosystem.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.