Google acquires four month old Bangalore based AI startup Halli Labs

Google has acquired Bangalore-based Halli Labs that's barely four months old and specializes in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Halli Labs announced the acquisition late Wednesday.“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,” the company said in blog post on Medium.

Excited to share that the @halli_labs team is joining @Google. https://t.co/RHxmXKKxZR

— Pankaj Gupta (@pankaj) July 12, 2017

Halli Labs was founded by Pankaj Gupta, who has previously worked at Twitter and Indian hospitality start-up Stayzilla. Pradhuman Jhala, who served at both Twitter and Stayzilla around the same time as Gupta, is an engineer at Halli Labs. He is “building products based on applied ML in speech recognition and NLP domains,” Jhala’s Linkedin profile says.

Halli Labs in its post says it was born with the vision of “applying modern ML techniques to old problems and domains”, an indication that it wanted to help rural India get access to information on the patchy internet. Halli means 'village' in Kannada.

AI is hot property in the tech world currently. From Google to Facebook to Apple, every tech company is looking to up its AI quotient through mergers and acquisitions. Apple acquired Hyderabad-based Tuplejump in September 2016, and UK-based Perceptio in October 2015. Google itself acquired French machine learning startup Moodstocks in July 2016. Just around the same time, Twitter too bought London-based Magic Pony to enhance its machine learning capabilities in image processing.

Besides these M&As, the tech titans also collaborated to launch an AI partnership last year “to study and formulate best practices on AI technologies, to advance the public’s understanding of AI, and to serve as an open platform for discussion and engagement about AI and its influences on people and society.”