Why did Google buy a four-month-old AI startup? For Pankaj Gupta

The real reason for Google’s acqui-hire of Bengaluru-based Halli Labs may not, after all, be artificial intelligence. Instead, it is about an ambitious, global programme

Halli Labs is Google's 12th AI acquisition across the world and the first in India

Gupta built Twitter's 'Who To Follow' recommendation engine

He is set to play a key role in Google's Next Billion Users programme

Google has been trying to hire Gupta for seven years

It was muttered curiously by people in Bengaluru at a popular coffee shop. “Did you hear about the company Google acquired,” one told another. “They used to work right across the road.” Right across the road is Investopad. A co-working space and an incubator.

What they were talking about is the acquisition of Halli Labs by Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc, on 12 July. Halli Labs was four months old. It was working, according to a few people familiar with the company, on a speech-to-text system, which was shelved soon after it was developed. What else? No one really knows. It has just one statement on the website: We are excited to share that Halli Labs team is joining Google. Simply put, it was an acqui-hire. Acqui-hire is a term used when a company is acquired primarily for the employees rather than the actual company, product or technology.

It’s easy to say that Google is on an acquisition spree, with a strong focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. Over the last five years, it has bought 11 AI startups across the world. Halli Labs is its 12th. The first in India.

Name	Year	Country
Halli Labs	2017	India
API.AI	2016	USA
Dark Blue Labs	2014	UK
Jetpac	2014	USA
Deep Mind Analytics	2014	UK
DNN Research Inc	2013	Canada
Moodstocks	2016	France
Kaggle	2017	USA
Timeful	2015	USA
Emu	2014	USA
Vision Factory	2014	UK
Granata Decision Systems	2015	Canada

Source: The Ken Research

There is a plan. Employees at Google say it’s CEO Sundar Pichai’s grand scheme. Over the last 12-18 months, Google has been repurposing itself as an “AI-first” company from its previous mobile-first approach. The company intends to apply AI to solve literally, everything. It includes the company’s ambitious Next Billion Users (NBU) programme, which seeks to address the key challenges in emerging markets like India, Brazil, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others. Its products and services are specifically designed to suit the internet and mobile infrastructure in those markets: Access and connectivity, device constraints and internet speeds, among others.

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Patanjali Pahwa

Patanjali has spent over seven years in journalism. He last worked at Business Standard as Principal Correspondent, where he wrote on startups, e-commerce companies and venture capital. He has worked at an array of institutions, which include Forbes India, Caravan and Outlook Business. He is a Mumbaikar, born and brought up. Patanjali did his BSc in IT from Mumbai University and then got his journalism degree from IIJNM in Bangalore. He is enamoured by Ernest Hemingway and Tom Waits and may try to sneak in references to them in his stories.

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Venkat Ananth

Venkat is currently in his tenth year in journalism. Prior to The Ken, he was Deputy Content Editor at Mint as part of the newspaper’s digital team. He also wrote in-depth features on the business of sport for the newspaper. His earlier assignments include Yahoo! (as a columnist) and the Hindustan Times, where he began his career. Born in Mumbai, Venkat holds a Bachelor of Mass Media (Journalism) degree from SIES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mumbai and a Master of Arts degree in International Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. He currently resides in New Delhi, where he moved nearly five years ago.

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