LinkedIn Acquires Predictive Insights Company Refresh

Continuing its social networking push, LinkedIn has acquired Refresh, a startup that helps people prepare for their professional meetings by collecting and sharing information information on the people they're meeting with. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but CEO Bhavin Shah did say that the startup would stop accepting new users effective immediately and will shut down completely by April 15.

The deal was revealed in a blog post by Refresh CEO Bhavin Shah on Thursday:

“ I started Refresh three years ago with Paul Tyma to create a digital briefing book that every professional could use to discover common ground and build strong relationships with people they were meeting”, and added this: “Since then Refresh has surfaced insights associated with hundreds of millions of meetings, and has been central to countless connections and closed deals.”

The deal follows LinkedIn's acquisition of online recruiting and talent acquisition platform Careerify. Refresh is LinkedIn's second acquisition this month.

Refresh, founded by CEO Bhavin Shah and CTO Paul Tyma, is a free iOS app that scours the web to provide users with a bunch of information about person they're about to meet with. It call up online information related to people that users are scheduled to meet, such news items mentioning those people, it also will pull information from social networking sites like Facebook or LinkedIn.

LinkedIn has a competing standalone app called Connections, which manages existing LinkedIn relationships and reminds users to follow up with people after they met. The company plans to incorporate Refresh's technology, which may include weaving it into the Connections app and delivering its output on LinkedIn's site.

Launched in 2011 and based in Mountain View California, Refresh previously raised $10 million in financing from early stage investors including Haystack, Redpoint Ventures, Foundation Capital, CRV, and Charles River Ventures. Twelve of Refresh's 14 employees are expected to report to LinkedIn's Identity team at the company's Mountain View headquarters next week.

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