BlackLocus Announces Its Acquisition by The Home Depot

Austin-based startup BlackLocus, a software data mining firm, announced Monday that the company has been acquired by The Home Depot.
The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
In a blog post, the company’s co-founders Rodrigo Carvalho and Lukas Bouvrie said that BlackLocus will become the innovation lab for The Home Depot.
“Our passion for data-driven decision making led us to start BlackLocus a few years ago,” they wrote. “We wanted to create the next version of business intelligence software for retailers. We wanted to mix internal data with public data. We wanted to turn large and complex data sets into simple and intuitive interfaces. We wanted to make it all actionable! Our vision has always been to allow retailers to extract value out of the vast, and ever growing, amount of information that exists today.”
But the co-founders reported that they had trouble bringing their vision to a product and that its engineering team faced a “multitude of very difficult technical challenges, and over the last year we created some disruptive innovations that enabled our business to soar. Solving those problems through technical and research innovation was part of the fun.”
The merger with Home Depot lets the company continue to pursue its vision with the backing of one of the world’s largest retailers.
“The company, which arrived in Austin in July 2011, has been named one of Inc.’s “Startups to Watch in 2012” as well as one of CNET’s Best Startup Ideas from 2011. The founders were classmates at Carnegie Mellon University and started their business at Pittsburgh’s AlphaLab Accelerator,” according to this profile Susan Lahey wrote on BlackLocus earlier this year.
BlackLocus had raised a $2.5 million first round of venture capital from DFJ Mercury and Silverton Partners.