Twitter has acquired Lucky Sort, a Portland, Oregon-based start-up with a data visualisation engine that helps to discover patterns in live data streams.
Lucky Sort's chief executive officer, Noah Pepper, announced the news on the start-up's website, adding that several of his team will be moving to San Francisco to join Twitter's "revenue engineering department".
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Pepper said that the start-up would help "current customers transition off our system in the coming months such that we can focus fully on our future at Twitter".
This suggests that the product may not continue to be available as a standalone offering.
Lucky Sort had initially raised a total of $600,000 (392,220) in venture capital funding, according to TechCrunch, with $100,000 (65,380) coming from StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon.
CEO Pepper, Jesse Smith and Daniel Fennelly are joining Twitter but Chief Science Officer Norman Packard, who had founded Prediction Company in 1990, and ProtoLife in 2004 is not moving to San Francisco.
The company's product TopicWatch could track down, summarise and analyse text-based content from a range of sources such as social media and government filings.
Unlike many other social analysis products, Lucky Sort uses natural language processing techniques to discover information from large unstructured data sets - but its data mining is based on statistics rather than input ontologies.
Lucky Sort joins a growing list of acquisitions that Twitter has made in the past year, including scalable computation start-up Ubalo, Vine and Bluefin Labs.
In his announcement, Pepper said: "Two years ago I started Lucky Sort with several friends. Our goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyse, summarise and visualise by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis.
"In building Lucky Sort we had an enormous amount of support from friends, employees, advisers and investors. It has been uplifting to have so many people help us and it highlighted just how much business is a social endeavour," he added.
