INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
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 company’s 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 Amazon’s 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 startup’s investors will receive around $5.5 million, with Bloomsbury’s 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 AI’s 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 I’m 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 company’s 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 Facebook’s intentions says the U.S
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 Facebook’s 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 Facebook’s 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
