SalesPredict

SalesPredict was an Israeli-based company founded in 2012 that developed a predictive analytics platform for B2B sales and marketing. The firm was established by CEO Yaron Zakai-Or and CTO Kira Radinsky. Radinsky, a recognized computer scientist and graduate of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, brought deep expertise in predictive data mining from her time at Microsoft Research and academic work. Zakai-Or provided a background in product management from roles at Microsoft, Kontera, and Quiver. Their joint vision was to apply a more scientific, data-driven approach to business decisions that were often based on intuition.

The company's core business was providing a SaaS platform that utilized machine learning and predictive analytics to help businesses identify their most promising sales leads. By analyzing a client's internal sales data and correlating it with external data sources from the web, the software could identify hidden buying patterns. This allowed marketing and sales teams to focus their efforts on leads with the highest probability of converting, who might spend more, or who were at risk of churning. The platform was designed to be fully automated, continuously updating its predictive models as market dynamics changed, a key differentiator from more static, consulting-based approaches.

In July 2016, eBay announced its acquisition of SalesPredict for an estimated $40 million. The acquisition was a strategic move by eBay to enhance its internal capabilities in artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically to support its structured data initiatives. The goal was to better understand product price attributes for buyers and to create predictive models for sellers, defining the probability of selling an item at a certain price over time. Following the acquisition, the SalesPredict team, including Zakai-Or and Radinsky, joined eBay's Israeli development center in Netanya, taking on roles as Director of Product Management and Director of Data Science, respectively.

Keywords: predictive analytics, lead scoring, B2B sales, machine learning, data mining, sales conversion, customer churn, marketing automation, SaaS, eBay acquisition