UPDATED 22:54 EDT / JULY 12 2017

EMERGING TECH

Google acquires Indian AI startup Halli Labs to help reach Net’s next billion users

Artificial intelligence is proving to be such a hot trend that some startups are barely able to get their feet off the ground before being acquired by bigger players. One such example is Halli Labs, an Indian firm focused on AI, machine learning and natural language processing, that Google Inc. just snapped up.

Halli Labs, which only came out of stealth mode this May, was the first to announce the news, said Tuesday it will be joining Google’s Next Billion Users initiative. That project is focused on reaching out to the Internet’s next billion users by addressing issues such as low bandwidth and connectivity in developing countries.

In a blog post on Medium, the company said its goal in joining Google was to “help get more technology and information into more people’s hands around the world.” Caesar Sengupta, a product management vice president at Google, later confirmed the acquisition via Twitter, though no price was disclosed:

The most interesting thing about Halli Labs is probably founder Pankaj Gupta, a data scientist who previously worked on recommendations and personalization at Twitter Inc., and also served as chief technology officer at Indian Airbnb Inc. rival Stayzilla, which has now shut down.

It’s not clear exactly what Halli Labs is building, but when it came out of stealth in May, it said it was using AI and machine learning to solve “old problems.”

One clue might come from the company’s name, however. As explained in the company’s debut blog post, the word “Halli” means “village” in Kannada, which is an Indian language. That could be a hint that it’s working on issues such as providing sanitation and fresh water, which remain big problems in rural areas of the subcontinent.

Image: Robert Scoble/Flickr

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