Julpan was set up by Ori Allon, who previously created the Orion search engine, which was bought by Google in 2006. Allon now becomes director of engineering at Twitter. He said in a message on Julpan’s website that he was “very proud” that Twitter had acquired the firm, which will now be able to “make an even greater contribution toward instantly bringing people closer to what is most meaningful to them”.

The New York-based company was set up last year. Its software is designed to understand the context and connections between social media data to allow people to search for relevant content.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.