Amazon.com, Inc., secretly acquired an image processing-focused machine learning startup in the shape of Orbeus Inc. and hired “nearly all” of its employees late last year, according to a report in Bloomberg that cited a person familiar with the matter.

The cloud computing and retail giant snapped up Sunnyvale, California-based Orbeus in fall of last year, according to the report. Before the acquisition, Orbeus was developing a ‘neural network-based AI solution’ designed to categorize and identify images.

Neither Amazon nor Orbeus chief executive Yi Li would comment on the report, and terms of the transaction were not available. However, Bloomberg termed the deal as a “full-on acquisition”.

Before being acquired by Amazon, Orbeus offered its image-processing solution, called Rekognition, “as-a-service” to developers. However, Orbeus’ website says the service is no longer available to new customers, “But we’re up to new/exciting things”, the company said.

Corroborating evidence of the acquisition was uncovered by Bloomberg, which found that Orbeus’ website is now owned by Amazon Technologies, a subsidiary of Amazon.com. As such, it seems that the report is indeed genuine, and confirms that Amazon has big plans to boost its AI capabilities, having held a secret conference on AI and robots just last month.

As to what Amazon will do with Orbeus’ technology remains to be seen, but there are a few obvious use cases. For one thing, Amazon’s mobile app could benefit from the technology to improve its camera search function. Alternatively, warehouse robots could use the technology to ensure the right items are packed into boxes ready for dispatch. Then again, the technology could also be used to build Amazon’s photo storage service into something that rivals Google Photos. Another idea could be to integrate the technology with Amazon’s Alexa AI assistant. Or it might be all of the above, or something completely different.

Machine learning startups are in vogue at the moment – pretty much every company that considers itself to be a “tech giant” is getting involved, with Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter all having made acquisitions or announced related new technologies in the space in recent months.

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