Lyft has acquired the team behind social service FinitePaths in a bid to improve its large-scale infrastructure and services. The move comes as the on-demand ride service has gotten rather aggressive in its expansion, launching in more than 100 new markets this year. The hiring of Balaji Raghavan and Vinay Kakade could be beneficial in helping Lyft remain online and adjust to increasing demand.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Consequently, FinitePaths’ iOS and Android app Trail Answers is shutting down in the next two weeks. The app specialized in helping provide users with answers around local questions by using social, local, and contextual signals. It was very similar to Quora or Jelly, the latter of which Pinterest recently acquired.
“We are very excited to have Balaji and Vinay join our team. They have extensive experience building large scale infrastructure and services. We see this experience as playing a critical role in helping us tackle some of the unique challenges we have at Lyft, as well as helping grow the Lyft community,” remarked Luc Vincent, Lyft’s vice president of engineering, in a statement.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
With this move, Lyft adds two more experienced individuals to its engineering team. Previously, Raghavan was a longtime Googler before leaving as engineering director in 2015. His cofounder Kakade was formerly the head of engineering at Amazon’s CloudSearch in India and also served a tour at Yahoo.
