IBM said on Wednesday it had acquired AlchemyAPI, a startup selling software that collects and analyzes unstructured text and data and offers them to website publishers and advertisers. IBM did not disclose the purchase price.

The acquisition also expands IBM's Watson ecosystem, welcoming 40,000 developers that have been working on the AlchemyAPI platform to the IBM Watson developer community.

IBM will integrate AlchemyAPI’s deep learning technology into the core Watson platform, augmenting Watson's ability to identify hierarchies and understand relationships within large volume data sets. The technology is expected to enhance Watson's ability to ingest, train and learn the "long-tail" of various data domains - including general business and target industries, as well as address the need to manage constantly evolving ontologies.

In addition, the acquisition will expand the number and types of scalable cognitive computing APIs available to IBM clients, developers, partners and other members of the Watson ecosystem. This includes language analysis APIs to address new types of text and visual recognition, and the ability to automatically detect, label and extract important details from image data.

Watson came to prominence in 2011 when it beat two previous champions on the U.S. quiz show Jeopardy. IBM gives developers access to Watson so they can use the technology in their own applications, but it has only just started to filter down to mainstream use.

AlchemyAPI’s deep learning platform enables clients, partners, developers and other third-parties to build cognitive-infused applications with advanced data analysis capabilities such as taxonomy categorization, entity and keyword extraction, sentiment analysis and web page cleaning. The company’s software platform processes billions of API calls per month across 36 countries and in eight languages.

The software, which learns as it goes, enables users to group together disparate information on a certain topic or event, find related articles or information sources, and helps advertisers target online ads better.