Yahoo's newest acquisition is a young startup named Distill that landed its $1.3 million in seed funding only about five months ago.
With the purchase, seven Distill employees will join Yahoo, and Distill will shutter its service on March 30, it said on its blog.
Distill was working on ways to help HR people recruit technical talent, a cool idea that combined video interviews with programming challenges, reports TechCrunch's Kim-Mai Cutler, who was first to spy the acquisition news. Distill was in private beta with the service, testing it with companies like ClearSlide, Disney, Box, ModCloth and FiveStars, Cutler reports.
As promising as that sounds, the recruiting tech wasn't what Yahoo wanted.
One of Distill's founders, Deng-Kai Chen, came from TapJoy, and Google before that. Tapjoy is a mobile ad app that helped invent the mobile "offers" business where mobile users get rewards for viewing ads or downloading apps. Its early days were controversial, when some of those rewards turned out to be somewhat fishy. TapJoy has since shed that image and now reaches 450 million mobile users each month, it says.
Chen was Tapjoy's third employee, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Distill co-founder Ken MacInnis hailed from StumbleUpon, where he spent five years, and did a short two-year stint at Yahoo before that.
Yahoo wants the Distill team for its TapJoy roots, it told Business Insider. A spokesperson told us:
I can confirm that we are hiring seven employees from Distill, all of whom are expected to join Yahoo in Sunnyvale next week. Prior to creating Distill, this group was part of the original team behind the creation of Tapjoy, a mobile performance-based advertising platform that drove deep engagement and monetization opportunities for mobile app publishers. At Yahoo, they’ll be drawing upon their expertise from the Tapjoy days to help us build out our mobile advertising solutions.
Here's the blog post from Distill that announces that the service will be closed.
A New Adventure for the Distill Team
We are excited to share the news that the Distill team is off to start a new adventure! We are joining Yahoo. Prior to creating Distill, we were part of the original team behind the creation of Tapjoy, a mobile performance-based advertising platform that drove deep engagement and monetization opportunities for mobile app publishers. We’ll be drawing upon our expertise from the Tapjoy days to help build out Yahoo’s mobile advertising solutions.
As of today, we have stopped development of Distill Schedule and Distill Interview. You will still be able to schedule interviews through the end of February, and the Distill platform will remain available through March 30, 2014. If you have any questions, concerns, or data requests, please contact us at support@distill.cc, or reach out to your account manager directly.
We want to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to everyone at the awesome companies we have been working with, as well as the candidates who have met their future employers through Distill. It's been a fun ride for us, and we couldn’t have gotten this far without your help. Thank you!!
The Distill Team