Staples Buys Personalization Startup Runa To Square Up To Amazon In The E-Commerce Game

Staples is today announcing an acquisition of Mountain View-based Runa, a specialist in e-commerce personalization technology — one of a series of recent moves the company has been making to compete better with Amazon and others in the online sale of office supplies. It looks like this might be the retailer’s first acquisition of a Silicon Valley startup, and it looks like Staples will be using the acquisition to start doing more in the space of e-commerce.

“Runa has a unique platform and outstanding talent with experience in e-commerce and online marketplaces,” said Ronald Sargent, chief executive officer and chairman, Staples, in a statement. “With Runa, we’re adding technology to better serve our customers with personalized items, offers, and delivery estimates, all in real-time. Runa will allow us to tap into the wealth of engineering and e-commerce expertise in the Silicon Valley area.”

Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we are trying to find out.

The news follows another development last week, when Staples announced the launch of Staples Connect, in partnership with smart home tech company Zonoff, to help create a hub for consumers to connect products in their home and control them via a single app.

There have been signs of some growing tension between Staples and Amazon. Last month, Staples, along with RadioShack, removed Amazon lockers from their retail stores, after a year-long trial hosting them. The lockers were there for people to get deliveries of Amazon products that they were not at home to sign for and accept; and the logic had been that those customers would then dip into Staples and RadioShack to buy something there. But with competition fierce between Amazon and the bricks-and-mortar trade, clearly the tradeoff wasn’t worth it for Staples.

And now, Staples is looking to hit Amazon a little harder where it hurts — by trying to improve its own e-commerce experience.

The main idea with Runa, which was founded in 2009, is that it creates personalization algorithms that help draw browsers in further and keep them from abandoning their shopping halfway through a site visit. That is a big problem that e-commerce companies face. And while there has been a lot of controversy around the best way of keeping users netted into the sales process, personalization could be one way of improving the experience in a way that can actually be useful to shoppers.

To date, Runa has raised some $10 million in venture funding. Its co-founder and CEO Ashok Narasimhan is a repeat entrepreneur who was also the co-founder of July Systems, and the founding CEO of Wipro, among many other roles. He’s also on the board of Rediff.com in India.

More to come.