Google Buys India AI Startup Halli Labs

Google confirmed Wednesday (July 12) its acquisition of Halli Labs, a startup in India that is centered on building smart technology systems to take on existing problems in the world.

In a blog post announcing the news, Halli Labs confirmed the acquisition for an undisclosed sum, saying it is “thrilled” to be teaming up with Google.

“As we wrote in our introductory blog post, Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI [artificial intelligence] and ML 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. Well, what better place than Google to help us achieve this goal. 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. We couldn’t be more excited,” the Indian company wrote in the post.

The deal was also confirmed by Caesar Sengupta, a product management VP at Google, in a tweet, reported TechCrunch.

“We are excited that the Halli Labs team is joining Google,” said spokesperson Taj Meadows in the report. “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.”

TechCrunch noted that it’s not clear how much money the Indian startup has raised and how many employees work for it. But despite not knowing the deal terms and the size of the company, the purchase is important because it shows that large tech companies are investing in smart technology, like artificial intelligence, in all sorts of ways and that there is ongoing consolidation in the AI field.

Indeed, a slew of AI startups have been acquired by tech heavy-hitters, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Facebook and China’s Baidu, among others.