Salesforce.com, Inc. has acquired deep learning startup MetaMind, Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

Founded in 2014, MetaMind built an automated image recognition platform founded on deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) that aimed to “simplify the complexity of our daily lives.”

The company was also building language based applications which it describes as “enterprise-grade AI.”

Of note, the company was in part funded by Salesforce founder Chief Executive Officer Marc Benioff.

“With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we’ll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes,” MetaMind Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Richard Socher said in a blog post announcing the deal. “We’ll extend Salesforce’s data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform.”

Salesforce said that planned to integrate MetaMind’s technology into Salesforce services, and that unpaid MetaMind users would see the service discontinued on May 4 while the service would discontinue for paying users June 4.

AI pursuit

Salesforce isn’t alone in taking a serious interest in AI with the likes of Facebook, Inc., Google, Inc., Microsoft, Inc. and others all making acquisitions in the space over the last 12 months, and Salesforce itself acquired PredictionIO, Inc. last month and Minhash, Inc. late last year.

As VentureBeat describes the technique used by these companies generally involves training artificial neural networks on large sets of data and then having them make inferences about new data.

MetaMind integrated into Salesforce is said to deliver enhancements in customer support, marketing automation, and other business processes by extending Salesforce’s data science capabilities by embedding deep learning into the platform itself, and it sounds great on paper, although no time frame was given for how long it would take for the integration.

Prior to acquisition, MetaMind had raised $8 million for Khosla Ventures and Marc Benioff.

Image credit: metavolution/Flickr/CC by 2.0