Oracle just bought a 20-person company for $50 million

Oracle on Thursday announced that it acquired Israeli company Crosswise.

While the company didn't announce terms of the deal, the Times of Israel is reporting that Oracle paid about $50 million.

Crosswise solves a hard problem for advertisers and marketeers.

It tries to figure out all the devices you use and match them to you as you surf the web with your smartphone, your tablet and your PC. In this way, if you do some shopping research on your phone and continue it on your PC, the marketeer knows its the same person interested in that product.

Crosswise was founded in 2013 by CEO Stephen Glantz, CTO Jonathan Sidnr (who worked on a number of startups that were bought by US companies like AOL and Facebook before launching Crosswise) and Vice President of R&D Ron Breitner.

Crosswise had about 20 employees and had raised $5 million from Israeli VCs including OurCrowd, a VC startup that helps ordinary upper-middle class folks (doctors, lawyers, business owners) invest in startups with the same terms that top-tier VCs get. OurCrowd is the brainchild of one of Israel's most powerful VCs, Jon Medved.

So Crosswise earned itself a pretty decent multiple for its investors.

In 2015, the Israeli tech scene was "unicorn crazy" several people told Business Insider during our visit there. Startup founders in the "Startup Nation" were frowning on this kind of quick-ish sale for a relatively big payout and were all dreaming of becoming the next Uber, Snapchat, or Cloudera with multi-billion-dollar valuations.

Now the super-hot venture investment bubble has cooled, with tighter money, less generous terms, and some investors writing down the valuations of those earlier investments. So that phase of unicorn madness among startups may be over, too. (Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, a big angel investor, warned in January that 2016 would bring "a lot of dead unicorns" and cheaper startup valuations.)

Oracle will be adding Crosswise to its Oracle Data Cloud, a service for marketeers that collects all kinds of data on how people are using the internet. Data Cloud is run by former BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol. Oracle bought BlueKai in 2014 for about $400 million, sources told Business Insider.