Google acquires Bengaluru firm

HALLI LABS was cofounded by Pankaj Gupta, the former chief technology officer of now defunct Stayzilla. THE FOUR-monthold startup was working on speed recognition and natural language processing.

American search and technology giant Google has acquired four-month old Bengaluru-based AIfocused start-up Halli Labs for an undisclosed amount.

“We are thrilled to share the news that the Halli Labs team is joining Google,” the company, which named after a Kannada word for village, announced in a blog post on its website. The news was confirmed by Google later.

“Welcome @Pankaj and the team at @halli_labs to Google. Looking forward to building some cool stuff together,” tweeted Google’s Vice President, Product Management, Caesar Sengupta on Wednesday.

Halli is founded by Pankaj Gupta, the former CTO of now defunct Stayzilla, and focuses on building deep learning and machine learning systems.

The four-month-old startup has been working on speed recognition and natural language processing among others.

“Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning) 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. [And] what a better place than Google to help us achieve this goal,” the post added.

“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,” said Google spokesperson Taj Meadows.

Before Stayzilla, Mr Gupta was incharge of running recommendation and personalization at Twitter.