Palantir Technologies Acquire Kimono Labs to Strengthen Its Data Extraction Capacity

Palantir Technologies Inc, which data analysis technology was well-known in U.S. intelligence community acquired Kimono Labs. Palantir is aiming to expand its data collection capacity using Kimono Labs' data extraction tool. While Kimono Labs will shut down its service at the end of this month.

Kimono Labs was founded in January 2014 by Ryan Rowe and Pratap Ranade. Both founders want to provide a tool to ease data extraction from an unstructured web. They have sucessfully developed a point-and-click tool to etract information from website that does not have API available, enabling web developers to avoid exhausting web scraping effort to extract data from the web.

This San Fransisco-based company attracted attention during a Y Combinator demo day in March 2014. Kimono Labs was selected as one of five best startups company in that startup incubator event which held to allow startups to pitch their ideas to potential investors. Prior to acquisition from Palantir, Kimono Labs have raised $5 million seed funding in two funding rounds from 33 investors.

Palantir and Kimono did not disclose about financial details of the deal. As a result of the acquisition, Kimono Labs will shut down its service which have ease the work of many web developers. In the statement, Kimono Labs said, "Because of our new roles at Palantir, it will not be possible for us to continue providing the publicly available cloud hosted kimono product."

In regard to Kimono Labs decision to shut its service, co-founder Pratap Ranade told Tech Crunch, "We care deeply about our users, but unfortunately I'm not at liberty to discuss the details."

Venture Beat reported Kimono Labs will officially shutdown its service on on February 29, 2016. All customers data can be retrieved from Kimono Labs' site until then. Kimono Labs also give a 30-day window to import APIs created from its service up to March 31.

After that day, Silicon Valley Business Journal reported that Kimono Labs will securely purge all users' data and Palantir won't have access to that data. Up to now, there are 125,000 developers, data scientists and businesses which used its data extraction tool. Therefore, wiping out the data collected and stored in Kimono Labs cloud service is necessary to protect privacy of the data owners.

Palantir Technologies Inc, the company that acquire Kimono Labs is a data analysis company which provide data mining, integration and data analysis software. Its data analysis technology was used heavily by American intelligence community to visualize relationship between data from multiple sources. Founded in 2004, the company's seed funding was raised by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm owned by U.S. federal government.

The acquisition of Kimono Labs will increase Palantir's capacity to extract data from the web. As a result of the acquisition, Kimono Labs will stop providing its data extraction service to public by the end of this month.