Fusion Corporate Partners

LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, has agreed to acquire ChoiceVendor, a startup that provides real-world ratings and reviews of business-to-business service providers in more than 70 categories across the United States. Financial terms of the acquisition are not being released.

“Our acquisition of ChoiceVendor is right in line with our top priority to build a world-class team at LinkedIn, says Jeff Weiner, chief executive officer of LinkedIn. “We’ve admired the work that Yan-David, Rama, and the talented ChoiceVendor team have done for some time now and are excited to have them join us, especially given their highly relevant work experience.”

ChoiceVendor is based in San Francisco and was founded by chief executive officer Yan-David Erlich and vice president of engineering Rama Ranganath. Prior to founding ChoiceVendor, Yan-David was an entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures and the founder and CEO of Mogad/Social.IM which was acquired by iSkoot in 2008. Previously, he also held software engineering and product management roles at Microsoft and Google. Rama was at Google before founding ChoiceVendor where he was an early engineer on the AdSense team and eventually managed several teams including the Google Ad Manager team. Prior to that, Rama worked at Microsoft.

“Since Yan-David and I worked with members of the LinkedIn team in the past during our time at Google, we’ve kept a sharp eye on the company’s phenomenal growth,” said Rama Ranganath, one of ChoiceVendor’s co-founders. “We’re excited about the direction that LinkedIn is headed, particularly in terms of helping its members derive valuable business insights from the site, and are looking forward to joining the team.”

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Related article – LinkedIn acquires mSpoke Posted on August 13, 2010