Yahoo announced today that it has acquired Jybe, which includes five former Yahoo employees.

Yahoo Cloud Platform Group SVP Jay Rossiter discusses the acquisition in a blog post.

“As part of this acquisition, we’re welcoming an extremely talented group of engineers and data scientists who will join Yahoo!’s platform organization, focused on targeting and personalization,” he writes. “This will be a ‘coming home’ for the team — all five are former Yahoos. Arnab Bhattacharjee was the VP of Yahoo! Search Technology (YST), one of the most well respected engineering and platforms groups in the company. He returns together with former key members of the YST and Hadoop teams — Tim Converse, Christian Kunz, Sameer Paranjpye, and Karthik Krishnamurthy.”

“While the Jybe app has closed, we’re confident that their data- and science-driven experience will supercharge our efforts to build great products and experiences for the millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day,” he adds. “On a personal level, I’m thrilled to welcome back Arnab, Tim, Christian, Sameer and Karthik. I, too, am a recent ‘boomerang,’ returning to Yahoo! to participate in the incredible spirit of innovation and entrepreneurialism that’s taken over the company. As a technologist, there are rare moments in your career when you get to be a fundamental part of the transformation of one of the most iconic companies on the Internet. Now is that moment for the Jybe team, me, and all of the talented engineers, developers and technologists at Yahoo!– in Sunnyvale and around the world.”

The Jybe team also put out an announcement. The team says:

The Jybe team first set off two years ago to bring mobile users smart, personalized recomendations on food and entertainment. This has been a fun and furious journey for our tiny startup, as we applied our various technology backgrounds to recommendation and mobile app design. It’s now time to move ahead to join a larger company, and Yahoo! is the perfect match.

For the five of us who will be joining Yahoo! this is a coming home – we are all former Yahoos. Three of us left Yahoo! to pursue our passion at Jybe, and two of us took a longer path via other startups and search-engine companies. We can’t wait to apply what we’ve learned about recommendation, personalization and the mobile experience to the hundreds of millions of people who come to Yahoo! every day. We look forward to (re)joining the world-class talent already working at Yahoo! and are excited to hit the ground running.

To our awesome users, thank you so much for trying out the Jybe platform. We hope it made your life a little more entertaining. We will be closing down the Jybe service, but we are putting together a tool so you can download and keep all your data. We’re eager to start applying everything we’ve learned and built to the Yahoo! platform, so stay tuned. Exciting developments are ahead!

CrunchBase describes Jybe as a startup focused on connecting people to the physical world around them.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.