Yahoo is spinning out its Vespa platform, which leverages AI and data online at scale. The move is being positioned as an effort to make Vespa more widely available to third parties. After supporting Yahoo’s needs for 16 years, the unit in 2021 began serving external customers including Spotify, Wix and OkCupid for needs such as “searching millions of documents within a global organization, serving better data-driven online ads, or allowing AI-based language apps the ability to scale.” Yahoo says it will continue to invest in Vespa and remain its largest customer even after the split.

Yahoo describes Vespa’s technology as “a diverse portfolio of approximately 150 applications,” all currently being used by Yahoo to do everything from help in “delivering personalized content across all of Yahoo’s pages in real-time” to “managing targeted advertisements within one of the world’s largest ad exchanges.”

Vespa collectively serves nearly one billion individual users “processing a staggering 800,000 queries per second,” according to the press release.

“Vespa has been a critical component to Yahoo’s AI and machine learning capabilities across all of our properties for many years,” Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone said. “We’ll continue to leverage all that Vespa has to offer while simultaneously creating a new business opportunity that allows other companies to harness its technology as an independent entity.”

“Jon Bratseth, previously a VP architect in the big data and AI group at Yahoo and one of the main contributors to Vespa, has been appointed [Vespa’s] CEO” writes TechCrunch, noting that “thousands of brands” use either the open-source release of Vespa that has been downloaded over 10 million times, or the “cloud-hosted, fully managed version sold by Yahoo, Vespa Cloud.”

“Those working with large language models such as ChatGPT and vector databases turn to Vespa when they realize that creating quality solutions that scale involves much more than just looking up vectors,” Bratseth explained in a blog post that refers to Vespa.ai as a resource enterprise users come to “for the AI-first approach” to search, recommendations and more

“Vespa was created by Yahoo in 2005 following the acquisition of a small search company called AlltheWeb in 2003,” writes SiliconANGLE, noting “the software was originally used to power Yahoo’s shopping services.” In 2017, the Vespa code was open-sourced and put to use for search. “Fast-forward to 2023 and Vespa has now morphed into a big data and AI tool, though with a fully featured search engine and vector database.”