Twitter Picks up Big Data Visualization Start-up 'Lucky Sort'

Lucky Sort, a Portland, Ore.-based startup, is a lucky company today, as it has been acquired by Twitter (News - Alert), TechCrunch reports.

The company drives a visualization and navigation engine called TopicWatch that helps to discover patterns in live data streams.

Terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, but Lucky Sort has leaked some of the details on its website. It has announced that it will be shuttering its service in the coming months, and that several members of its team are going to be relocating to Twitter’s San Francisco offices to join the company’s “revenue engineering department.”

Lucky Sort was pretty low profile until the start of 2012, when it was announced that it raised a half-million dollar seed round from Neu Venture Capital, Invite Investments (the founders of Invite Media (News - Alert)) and several angel investors, including Adam Riggs of Shutterstock.com, BankSimple co-founder Alex Payne and Norman Packard, who juggles a few genius professions including chaos theory physicist, quantitative trading pioneer and roulette wheel hacker. Packard can add chief science officer at Lucky Sort to his resume.

Packard is not joining Twitter (maybe because he has 50 other jobs), but chief executive officer Noah Pepper, Jesse Pepper, Jesse Smith and Daniel Fennelly are among those who will be heading over to the Golden Gate City. 

Lucky Sort has plans to transition customers off of its platform. When asked what he meant by Twitter’s “revenue engineering department,” Pepper said, quizzically, “It’s where we’ll be shoveling coal into the money printing machine.”

Of course! The money printing machine!

Lucky Sort had raised a total of $600,000 before it was bought by Twitter, with $100,000 coming from Howard Lindzon, the chief executive officer and co-founder of StockTwits.

Other recent Twitter acquisitions include another data-focused service called Ubalo, and others such as We Are Hunted, Vine, Crashlytics and Bluefin Labs.