LinkedIn scoops up data-centric rival Bright for $120M

Bright, a jobs and hiring platform that set out to challenge LinkedIn with its focus on data science, is now a part of the professional social network.

As LinkedIn posted its solid fourth quarter earnings — which slightly outpaced Wall Street’s expectations — the company announced its intention to acquire Bright for $120 million (around $32.4 million in cash and the rest in stock). The acquisition is expected to close during the first quarter of 2014.

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With the Bright buy, LinkedIn eliminates a compelling rival offering and gets an influx of data science talent.

Millions of job seekers have flocked to Bright, which rates their relevance to each job opportunity and displays that score to both applicants and recruiters. Bright’s algorithm accounts for factors like experience, location, and hiring patterns.

LinkedIn, which earns most of its revenue from its recruiting products, is keen to improve its matching opportunities.

“Bright’s matching tech will add further muscle to our own, which will be crucial to matching talent with opportunity at massive scale as we build the economic graph,” LinkedIn spokesperson Joe Roualdes told VentureBeat. “As for the specifics of how we’ll merge them, we’re still thinking through the details.”

Bright is LinkedIn’s largest acquisition to date, topping earlier buys like Slideshare ($119 million) and Pulse ($90 million).

LinkedIn posted decent fourth quarter earnings this afternoon, with a net income of $3.8 million — down from $11.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2012. Fourth quarter revenue was $447.2 million, a 47 percent increase from the prior year’s quarter.