Ola acqui-hires Pickup.ai

Ride-hailing company Ola acqui-hired Pickup.ai, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup based out of Bangalore. Pickup.ai uses autonomous technologies like AI, computer vision and sensor fusion to provide seamless AI-powered solutions for businesses. As part of the deal, the team at Pickup.ai will join Ola.

Ola is increasing its focus on using advanced analytics and deep technology to build futuristic mobility solutions for India and the world. The application of machine learning and AI will enable the company to identify deep insights that can lead to improved mobility outcomes. This will include investments in early-stage businesses, acquisitions as well as acquihires across AI, Machine Learning, Computer Vision and other emerging areas of deep technology.

Earlier this year, Ola announced its intent to set up an Advanced Technology Centre in the San Francisco Bay area, to focus on developing next-generation technologies in mobility like Electric, Connected and Autonomous Vehicles. By bringing deep domain expertise to Ola, this acquihire will also deliver innovations that continue to improve safety and transform the customer experience.

Ola was founded in 2011 by Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati with a mission to build mobility for a billion people.

Freshworks acquires Natero

Customer engagement service Freshworks which you may still remember under its old name of Freshdesk, has acquired Natero, a customer success service with some AI/ML smarts that helps businesses prevent churn and manage their customers.

The acquisition will help the company complete its mission to provide its users with a 360-degree view of their customers. Freshdesk started out with a focus on customer support and then added additional functionality for marketers and other roles over time. Today, however, companies want this full 360-degree view of a customer and are able to offer differentiated service to their top customers, for example. In many ways, the acquisition of Natero closes the loop here.

Natero will continue to exist as a stand-alone product, but it will also become part of the Freshworks 360 suite, Freshwork’s integrated customer engagement suite. Ahead of today’s acquisition, Natero had raised a total of $3.3 million. That’s not a lot for a startup that launched back in 2012, but Soules noted how he was able to fund the company’s expansion through revenue. The two companies did not disclose the acquisition price.

Byju acquired Osmo

Tencent backed online learning platform Byju is looking to leverage Osmo, the Silicon Valley startup it recently acquired for $120 Million, to build capabilities in technologies such as computer vision and artificial intelligence.

Osmo, founded by former Googlers specializes in using computer vision for creating blended learning games for kids. While the startup will be able to leverage Byju’s content, the Bengaluru-based firm will get access to Osmo’s tech smarts.  Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field in which computers are trained to extract, analyze and understand digital images or videos, with the intent of replicating what humans can do.

Byju’s DNA is predominantly offline (and content), and even today a bulk of their distribution remains offline. Osmo will help the company develop a tech lens in the product offering. Osmo’s technology can today detect shapes, numbers, letters and even images of characters and objects in relatively real-time, but going forward it says this capability will grow. Imagine a biology classroom where students get step-by-step instructions on how to dissect a frog from software that is watching their every move.

The startup will continue refining its machine vision tools and will add more members to its team to speed up the development of advanced capabilities. Today, Osmo’s software is only trained to recognize pre-programmed images, but in the future, it could make sense of something it is seeing for the first time and throw up relevant content for the student.

Oyo acquires AblePlus

Hospitality firm Oyo has acquired AblePlus, the Mumbai based Internet of Things (IoT) startup. Oyo will now be introducing IoT into the basic precincts of their Hotel Management System.

The company also introduced industry-first initiative of Digital Arrival & Departure Register, which has been adopted by the state governments of Haryana and Rajasthan. In addition, Oyo also makes use of Machine Learning (ML) based algorithms to personalize the user journey. Customers will now be able to look at self-check-ins, which will be supported by digital arrival and departure register, self KYP with Aadhaar, and IoT server-managed smart locks.

With the rollout of the added technology enabled operations, Oyo team believes they will be able to track assets across properties better, and also work in reduction of wastage of electricity and minimizing the carbon footprint. This will take OYO a step closer to consolidating its vision of creating beautiful living spaces across India.

The team is also looking at introducing voice-based assistance in rooms, enabling automation of controlling appliances and lights among other services. Going forward, Oyo also plans to implement a comprehensive guest entertainment programme that will include fitness, gaming and augmented experiences. The company is also looking at several other integrated technology solutions including enhancing its Oyo Asset Management offering, so that it is easy to partner with them.

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.

Google acquires Kaggle

Technology giant Google has announced the acquisition of Kaggle, a start-up that hosts a number of data scientists, for an undisclosed amount at the Cloud Next 2017 conference. Founded in 2010, Kaggle is home to the world’s largest community of data scientists and machine learning enthusiasts.

More than 8 Lakh data experts use Kaggle to explore, analyze and understand the latest updates in machine learning and data analytics. Kaggle and Google Cloud will continue to support machine learning and deployment services while offering the community the ability to store and query large datasets.

Google must lower the barriers of entry to AI and make it available to the largest community of developers, users and enterprises so that they can apply it to their own unique needs. Making Google Cloud Technology available to Kaggle community will allow us to offer access to powerful infrastructure, scalable training and deployment services and the ability to store and query large data sets.

Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, the two public clouds that are bigger than Google cloud, also offer data sciences services. Google cloud already provides Cloud Machine Learning  Engine, among other managed services for working on data.