Some more M&A news in the world of artificial intelligence. Today it was made public that Google has acquired Halli Labs, a very young (its first public appearance was on May 22 of this year) startup based out of Bengaluru, India, that was focused on building deep learning and machine learning systems to address what it describes as “old problems.”
The company says it will be joining Google’s Next Billion Users team “to help get more technology and information into more people’s hands around the world.”
Halli announced the news itself earlier today in a short post on Medium, and Caesar Sengupta, a product management VP at Google, also confirmed the acquisition with a Tweet.
Google has now also confirmed the acquisition with a short statement it provided to TechCrunch.
“We are excited that the Halli Labs team is joining Google,” said spokesperson Taj Meadows. “They’ll be joining our team that is focused on building products that are designed for the next billion users coming online, particularly in India.”
It’s not clear whether or not Halli Labs (“Halli” means village in Kannada, the company notes) was funded. The company’s founder, Pankaj Gupta, is a data scientist with an interesting history that includes running recommendation and personalization at Twitter, and a role as CTO at now-defunct Indian Airbnb rival Stayzilla, among other entrepreneurial ventures.
It’s also not clear…