Gazehawk‘s founders are moving on to Facebook.
The company’s technology was recently featured at the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting for the insights its tech provides into the performance of creative – specifically its heat mapping technology to measure users’ visual engagement with ads.
The company’s founder Joe Gershonson and Brian Krausz announced the news on their site. Joe Gershonson tells AdExchanger that the the company’s tech and intellectual property will be sold separately.
“GazeHawk Team Joins Facebook
When we founded GazeHawk, we chose to attack a truly difficult computer vision challenge. Our team took a problem that many thought to be impossible – using ordinary webcams to determine where volunteers were looking on their computer screens – and turned it into a powerful product with real potential. While we’re still excited about the future of this technology, the time has come for us to move in a different direction.
While working on GazeHawk, we attracted the attention of the Facebook team, who were impressed with our ability to build out a powerful technology and platform. Likewise, we were impressed by the compelling story going on at Facebook today. As a result, we’re happy to announce that we will be joining the Facebook team. There’s a great culture at Facebook, focusing on fast, bold, innovative solutions, and we’re looking forward to being a part of it. We’ll be working on projects unrelated to GazeHawk, most likely on product and backend engineering.
GazeHawk’s product and technology are not part of the acquisition and will remain completely independent of Facebook. GazeHawk has developed a best-of-class technology that does not exist anywhere else, and is committed to seeing it continue to provide benefits to others. The team welcomes suggestions and thoughts on potential options at team@gazehawk.com.
A huge thanks to Y Combinator, our other investors, our advisors, and everyone we’ve worked with over the last two years. It’s been an amazing journey, and it wouldn’t have been possible without you!
— Brian & Joe”
Though an acqui-hire of sorts, no doubt Facebook sees the need to speak to brands regarding insights on effective, premium advertising through the Facebook platform. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Gazehawk was a Y Combinator company and presented at last September’s ad tech event.
Read more about the research that Gazehawk performed as part of the IAB’s new portfolio of larger, “premium” ad units here.
The Business Insider says the Gazehawk team starts at Facebook next week.
By John Ebbert
