CNN acquires Canopy to help build its Facebook, Apple news aggregation rival

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CNN has acquired Canopy, a “private personalization architecture company.”

The buy is being billed as a way to help boost CNN’s development of an upcoming news aggregation platform codenamed “NewsCo.”

“The effort is the first from CNN’s recently formed team of strategists and technologists whose exclusive focus is the creation of new products and platforms to address ever evolving user needs and drive future growth for the business,” CNN writes in a press release.

“This acquisition enables us to light up in a single transaction a proven, best-in-class team whose deep knowledge and skill sets would’ve taken many months or even years to assemble,” said CNN EVP and Chief Digital Officer Andrew Morse in the same statement. “Canopy’s culture of fast-cycle, iterative software and product development will enable us to more rapidly realize our ambitions and deliver against our goals.

Canopy is led by Founder and CEO Brian Whitman and launched in 2018 with “a private, explainable and controllable architecture to give people the power of discovery while keeping their data secure.”

The platform blends human curation, machine learning and privacy features.