eBay Snaps Up Hunch for $80M

eBay made a splash today by acquiring Hunch, a recommendations startup that launched in 2009, the companies announced. The official statement didn’t list a price, but Michael Arrington’s Uncrunched, which first reported the deal, said it would be "somewhere around $80 million." Hunch founder Chris Dixon will take over eBay’s existing 50-man recommendations team.

Prediction has been a tough egg for eBay to crack because so many of its products are used or unique, making them hard to analyze, eBay’s chief technology officer tells Reuters. “Hunch was solving a similar problem with unstructured data,” he says. “The type of technologies were similar enough that this makes sense." (More eBay stories.)