Perhaps rightly, there has long been a perception that Google-owned Deepmind has been the most aggressive in hoovering up a lot of the U.K.s best talent in artificial intelligence, but now Facebook appears to be turning its eye to the country.TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup that has built natural language processing (NLP) technology to help machines answer questions based on information gleaned from documents.
According to sources, Facebook plans to deploy the companys team and tech to work on combatting fake news and to tackle other content issues.Bloomsbury is an alumni of Entrepreneur First, the company builder that invests in technical and domain expertise talent and helps those individuals start companies.
The startup is also backed by Fly.VC, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund, and the U.K.
tax payer-funded London Co-investment Fund.William Tunstall-Pedoe, who was instrumental in the development of Amazons AI-powered digital assistant Alexa, is also an angel investor in Bloomsbury.Multiple sources say Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire Bloomsbury AI, in a deal that will see a mixture of cash and stock change hands.
In one scenario, the startups investors will receive around $5.5 million, with Bloomsburys founding team in line for the remaining $17.5 million, paid in restricted Facebook stock.
Either way, this represents a modest return for the bulk of investors, although EF given that it invests pre-seed is likely to have had a larger multiple.Given the price and the stage Bloomsbury AI were at, the acquisition also has more than a whiff of acqui-hire to it, although there is some IP in the deal.
I understand from one source that Bloomsbury AIs CTO/Head of Research, Sebastian Riedel, was the biggest draw.
He is considered to be a leading expert in the area of NLP, and is a professor at UCL.
According to his LinkedIn, he also co-founded and is an advisor to Factmata, the U.K.
startup that purports to have developed tools to help brands combat fake news.Which brings us to the possible reason for why Facebook is acquiring Bloomsbury AI, a startup that Im told was phenomenally strong when viewed as a group of researchers, but less so when it comes to getting a commercially viable product out of the door.
The companys sole product is an API called Cape that lets developers add question answer functionality to websites and other documents.Indeed, a source who claims to have some knowledge of Facebooks intentions says the United States tech giant may be planning to put the Bloomsbury AI team on the task of helping it develop technology to fight fake news on the platform and solve other aspects of its glaring moderation problem.Other areas of Facebooks product that might benefit from the QA technology that powers Cape include being used as a workplace tool for companies to discover content in documents, or on Facebooks consumer offering as a way of significantly improving its search and knowledge-base functionality.It is also understood that Bloomsbury AI being based in London was a factor, as Facebook aims to have an AI presence in the U.K.
capital city and is thought to be sourcing further acquisitions here.Multiple sources have confirmed the deal to us, although Facebook declined to comment.Additional reporting by Ingrid Lunden