Walmart Labs acqui-hires Int.AI

Walmart Labs, the local product development division of US retail giant Walmart has acqui-hired Delaware based data analytics and machine learning startup Int.AI, its second acqui-hire in India in three months, as it looks to strengthen its engineering team.

Int.AI was founded in 2016. It analyses data and shares it with targeted users over email as well as team messenger tools like Slack. In September, Walmart Labs brought the entire team of engineers from Bengaluru-based Appsfly onboard, which built a system for micro apps to get hosted and streamed on any platform.

Walmart move highlights its keen urge to deepen its presence in the country. The US-based retailer has been investing heavily in the country this year, starting with the game changing $16 Bn acquisition of Indian ecommerce unicorn Flipkart. The company also opened its 23rd wholesale store in Visakhapatnam recently. It claims 19 of these centres have already achieved break even.

Globally, acqui-hiring has been used by large companies to get talent in a new domain it looks to test waters. In 2017, Google acquired Halli Labs, a four-month-old startup out of Bengaluru that was developing artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. In October, Airtel acqui-hired Authme ID services, an AI-based solution firm.

Google acquires Halli Labs

American Technology giant Google has acquired Bangalore based artificial Intelligence firm Halli Labs for an undisclosed sum. The firm becomes the latest AI start up to be snapped by a technology giant after a spate of similar acquisitions by firms such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple among others.

Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI and Machine Learning techniques to old problems and domains. In order to help technology enable people to do whatever it is what they want to do, easier and better. According to research by CB Insights, 34 Artificial Intelligence startups have been acquired in the first quarter of this year, which is double the number compared to the year-ago period.

The study also notes that Google has been the most aggressive in this space with 11 acquisitions since 2012 followed by Apple, Intel and Facebook. Some of the acquisitions by Google in AI include firms such deep learning and neural network startup DNNresearch from the computer science department at the University of Toronto in 2013; British company DeepMind Technologies in 2014 for $600 Million, visual search startup Moodstock, and bot platform Api.ai last year.

It acquired predictive analytics platform Kaggle in the first quarter of this year. Even though India has become the third largest market for start-ups, acquisitions by global technology companies have been few. Some of the notable ones include ZipDial which was acquired by Twitter in January 2015 and LittleEyeLabs that was snapped up by Facebook in January 2014.