Jul 29, 2020

Google Inc. has acquired a four months old Bengaluru-based startup Halli Labs, which develops artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. In a blog post, the company announced, “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.” ADVERTISEMENT Commenting on the acquisition, 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”. The startup was founded in April this year by Pankaj Gupta, an Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and Stanford University alumnus. As per his Linkedin profile, he worked at Twitter in San Francisco, US, for over five years before joining Indian hospitality start-up Stayzilla. Halli Labs will now be joining Google’s Next Billion Users team, which is part of its bet to expand its services to non-English speaking users from India. Such users, according to a study it co-authored with KPMG, will form nine out of the ten new internet users coming online. In a blog post, the company said that it is joining Google with a goal of applying modern machine learning techniques to “old problems and domains”. The acquisition was later confirmed by Ceaser Sengupta, Vice President of Product Management at Google, in a twitter post. Welcome @Pankaj and the team at @halli_labs to Google. Looking forward to building some cool stuff together. https://t.co/wiBP1aQxE9 Google has been aggressively expanding its AI capabilities, especially through acquisitions. Some of its investments include deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch, UK-based DeepMind Technologies, visual search startup Moodstock, and bot platform Api.ai. Share this: