Walmart Labs became part of Walmart Global Tech, the technology and business services organization within Walmart. Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman founded Kosmix in 2005. In April 2011, Walmart acquired Kosmix and formed@WalmartLabs, a research division, out of it.

Harinarayan and Rajaraman were co-founders of Junglee, the first shopping search engine which was acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. They later created Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk and started an early-stage VC fund, Cambrian Ventures, that backed several companies later acquired by Google.

Kosmix expanded its focus from a vertical to a horizontal search engine in June 2008, covering all subjects. For a keyword or topic that a user enters, "Kosmix gathers content from across the Web to build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly. The company has built a taxonomy of nearly five million categories on a wide range of topics. The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories.