Google acquires Bangalore-based artificial intelligence firm Halli Labs

NEW DELHI: American technology giant Google has acquired Bangalore-based artificial intelligence (AI) firm Halli Labs for an undisclosed sum.

The firm which was co-founded by former chief technology officer of now defunct Stayzilla, Pankaj Gupta, announced the acquisition in a blogpost on Tuesday.

The firm becomes the latest AI start up to be snapped by a technology giant after a spate of similar acquisitions by firms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple among others.

“Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI and ML (Machine Learning) techniques to old problems and domains?—?in order to help technology enable people to do whatever it is that they want to do, easier and better. Well, what better place than Google to help us achieve this goal,” the company said in a blog.

“We will be joining Google’s Next Billion Users team to help get more technology and information into more people’s hands around the world. We couldn’t be more excited!” it added.




Before Stayzilla, Gupta was incharge of running recommendation and personalization at Twitter. He could not be reached immediately for a comment.

A Google spokesperson said, “We are excited that the Halli Labs team is joining Google. 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.”

According to research by CB Insights, 34 artificial intelligence startups have been acquired in the first quarter of this year, which is double the number compared to the year-ago period. The study also notes that Google has been the most aggressive in this space with 11 acquisitions since 2012 followed by Apple, Facebook and Intel.

Some of the acquisitions by Google in AI include firms such deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto in 2013; British company DeepMind Technologies in 2014 for $600 million; visual search startup Moodstock, and bot platform Api.ai last year. It acquired predictive analytics platform Kaggle in the first quarter of this year.

Even though India has become the third largest market for start-ups, acquisitions by global technology companies have been few.

Some of the notable ones include ZipDial which was acquired by Twitter in January 2015 and LittleEyeLabs that was snapped up by Facebook in January 2014.