Google acquires two-month old Bengaluru-based AI startup Halli Labs

US search behemoth Google has acquired Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup Halli Labs. Barely two months old venture(since its public launch), Halli Labs was focused on building deep learning and machine learning systems to solve an old problem.

In a blog post, the company says it will be joining Google to help get more technology and information into more people’s hands around the world.

Halli Labs was founded by Pankaj Gupta with the goal of applying modern AI and ML 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.

A Google spokesperson said that the Halli Labs team will be joining Google. Caesar Sengupta, a product management VP at Google, has confirmed the acquisition with a Tweet.

Welcome @Pankaj and the team at @halli_labs to Google. Looking forward to building some cool stuff together. https://t.co/wiBP1aQxE9

— Caesar Sengupta (@caesars) July 12, 2017

Prior to Halli Labs, Gupta worked with Twitter and headed technology at now defunct accommodation marketplace -StayZilla. “Well, what better place than Google to help us achieve this goal. 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,” mentioned a blog post by the company.

Google’s Next Billion Users program is focused on helping the non-English speaking population in emerging markets, primarily in India. The acquisition is likely to strengthen artificial intelligence and Machine Learning capability for the program.

According to a FactorDaily report, Next Billion Users program is led by Caesar Sengupta with a team of about 120 people spread across Hyderabad, Zurich, and Singapore. Globally, major Internet companies are trying to spruce-up their expertise in Artificial Intelligence by acquiring startups. Baidu, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook including several others had acquired more than a dozen of startups in the AI space.