What happened
On June 16, 2022, Reddit announced it had agreed to acquire Spell, a machine-learning platform that let teams run resource-intensive ML experiments in the cloud without owning specialized hardware. Spell had been founded in 2016 by former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino, and the acquisition — terms undisclosed — was explicitly aimed at accelerating Reddit's ability to deploy machine learning across the company, improving the speed and relevance of recommendations and surfacing content more effectively to users.
Reddit said Spell's technology and engineers would help integrate ML across its Product, Safety, and Ads teams. Piantino joined Reddit as Vice President of Foundational Product, reporting to then-Chief Product Officer Pali Bhat, and led a focused team building out the company's ML infrastructure. The deal was part of a 2022 string of AI- and ML-focused acquisitions — including Spiketrap and the Oterlu moderation team later that year — through which Reddit assembled the in-house machine-learning capacity that would underpin everything from ad targeting to content moderation and, ultimately, the data-licensing and AI-search ambitions it pursued after going public.