Company Overview
Grapeshot automatically analyses content and builds real-time behavioural profiles to drive the personalised delivery of content, using implicit search methods.
Grapeshot helps publishers and ad networks to optimise the placement of online ads using their existing ad server systems.
John Snyder
John Snyder is one of many entrepreneurs in the high-tech cluster around Cambridge who commercialised technology originally researched within Cambridge University. In 1992 he teamed up with Martin Porter to develop Muscat, the natural language search software company, which commercialised "concept-based" searching prior to the advent of other Bayesian-based search providers. John built up the a strong customer base of international corporations over a five year period, including BBC, Reuters, Nokia, NASA, Virgin.Net, and The Telegraph, before negotiating the sale of Muscat in 1997 to The Dialog Corporation, the large aggregator of online business information.
In 1999 John took a small team of engineers and built a global index of the internet, launching it as the WebTop subsidiary of The Dialog Corporation. Through 2000, he grew the WebTop team to 40 plus staff and the internet index to 500 million documents, drawing on new ideas of P2P (peer-to-peer) networks. In 2001 he "retired" to Cambridge University as Director of Business Creation. He has since been a Cambridge Angels business angel and has invested privately in local technology companies.
Today he directs Grapeshot Limited, another company founded by his Muscat partner Dr. Martin Porter.
John is a graduate of Cambridge University where he still contributes to teaching as an "Entrepreneur In Residence".