American giant Oracle buys Tel Aviv based startup Crosswise for $50 million

Israeli company has developed a cross-device identification system to help advertisers target consumers.

By GLOBES
Updated: APRIL 16, 2016 09:45
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison (photo credit: REUTERS)
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison
(photo credit: REUTERS)
US software giant Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) has acquired Israeli big data company Crosswise. No financial details were disclosed about the acquisition of the Tel Aviv based company but Israeli media reports say that Oracle is paying $50 million.
Crosswise has developed a cross-device identification system based on big data, data science and machine learning that identifies, which PCs, phones, tablets, digital TVs and other connected devices are being used by individual consumers. This, according to Oracle, "enables marketers and premium publishers to realize the benefits of cross-device advertising, personalization and analytics." In other words, help advertisers target appropriate consumers. 
The company was founded by CEO Steve Glanz, CTO Jonathan Seidner, and VP R&D Ron Reiter. In September 2015, Crosswise raised $3 million in a Series A financing round from ZhenFund, Emerge, Giza Venture Capital, OurCrowd and Horizons Ventures.
In its release, Oracle said that Crosswise would become part of Oracle Data Cloud. "The addition of Crosswise further broadens the Oracle ID Graph to construct a complete view of consumers' digital interactions across multiple devices."
Oracle added, "Crosswise's innovative technology processes over one petabyte of user and device activity data from billions of unique devices every month. By applying advanced data science and proprietary machine-learning techniques to this data, Crosswise constructs a new probabilistic Device Map matching multiple devices to individual users in an accurate, scalable and high quality manner."
This is Oracle's second acquisition in Israel this year. In February 2016, Oracle, led by founder chairman and CTO Larry Ellison, acquired Ra'anana based cloud software startup Ravello Systems for $500 million.