Robert Galbraith/Reuters
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff
The announcement was made through MinHash's website, where it said, "At Salesforce, we will continue to pursue our passion for search, data science and machine learning on a much broader scale, as part of the world's #1 CRM company."
MinHash's service will shut down on January 21, according to its website. TechCrunch first reported the acquisition.
The company didn't disclose the financial terms of the deal. Salesforce confirmed the acquisition but declined to provide furher comment.
MinHash is a four-person startup founded in 2014 by engineers hailing from Oracle and eBay. Its cofounder Naren Chittar spent over 5 years at eBay's Search Engine Group, while its other cofounder Jayesh Govindarajan worked at Oracle and Avaya for nearly a decade.
MinHash's website describes its product as a "virtual assistant" for marketers. It says it can scan through thousands of media sources to spot the latest trends, and automatically create marketing campaigns accordingly.
This is Salesforce's fourth acquisition of the year, and the second in the machine learning/data analytics space. In May, it bought a small calendar scheduling app called Tempo AI.
Salesforce has been making a strong push towards enhancing its analytics capabilities lately. It launched a new analytics platform called Wave in 2014, and a new service that collects and analyzes data collected from connected devices, called the IoT Cloud this year.
But today's acquisition may also be a sign of Salesforce spending more resources to beef up its marketing cloud service, which is the smallest business among its core cloud products. In the first nine months of this year, marketing cloud reported $470 million in revenue, or roughly 10% of total revenue, lagging far behind its sales cloud and service cloud, which each generated $1.9 billion and $1.3 billion in revenue, respectively.