Yahoo Is Purchasing Artifact From Instagram’s Co-Founders

Yahoo is acquiring Artifact, a news aggregation platform built by Instagram’s co-founders, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. Last Tuesday, the company announced the news; however, they did not disclose the financial terms of the said deal.

Artifact will no longer work as a standalone product, but other features and the exclusive AI-powered personalization technology will be merged with Yahoo products, including the Yahoo News app. During the transition, Krieger and Systrom will assist Yahoo in terms of ‘advisory capacity,’ but they won’t be joining the company since the news and information giant is not really looking for new staff, only the Artifact’s tech.

The acquisition happened a few months after Krieger and Systrom declared they would be closing Artifact. Systrom said the market opportunity isn’t sufficiently large to support ongoing investment. Artifact has a lot of new features, such as the AI summaries of articles, a posting feature similar to Twitter, and the ability to let the users mark and comment on articles as clickbait. Nonetheless, most of these features require a ton of moderation, which the app’s eight-person team cannot handle. Systrom added that he hopes the instinctive product experience will eventually reach the scale that he and Krieger had originally envisioned.

The acquisition closed on March 29.