Yahoo announced it is spinning out Vespa, its big data serving engine, into an independent venture.
Vespa, born out of Yahoo's acquisition of Overture and the Norwegian search engine AlltheWeb.com in 2005, evolved into a versatile tool allowing developers to compute over large-scale datasets in real-time.
Jon Bratseth, a key contributor to Vespa and a former vice president in Yahoo's big data and AI group, has been appointed as the CEO of the newly spun-out entity.
“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 Bratseth.
“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.”
Yahoo is set to invest in Vespa and retain its position as the company's largest customer following this spin-out, also maintaining a stake in Vespa and a seat on its board of directors.
Vespa, since its open-source release in 2017, has become a linchpin in Yahoo's AI and machine learning capabilities across its properties. It drives searches, article recommendations, and ad targeting on Yahoo-owned platforms, serving around 150 applications and nearly a billion users, processing 800,000 queries per second.
"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.”
Yahoo joins other companies like Intel in spinning out its prized assets into a new company. Earlier this week, Intel announced plans to spin out its programmable chip division as a standalone business.