Artificial intelligence startup MetaMind launched in late 2014 with $8 million in funding from Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff and Khosla Ventures. Now, Salesforce has has acquired it.
Salesforce will integrate MetaMind’s technology into its services.
“With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we’ll be able to offer customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes,” says MetaMind co-founder and CEO Richard Socher. “We’ll extend Salesforce’s data science capabilities by embedding deep learning within the Salesforce platform.”
“Over the past year and a half, we’ve been on a mission to empower business users with state of the art deep learning technology to simplify, improve and automate decision making,” he says. “And now, we’ll be able to continue our journey at Salesforce on a much larger scale, with the resources and ecosystem of one of the world’s most innovative and influential enterprise software companies.”
While under Salesforce, MetaMind intends to continue its AI research. According to Socher, they’ll be publishing “groundbreaking discoveries” that advance the technology. They’re also hiring.
MetaMind’s products will be discontinued on May 4 for unpaid web users with June 4 being the end date for recurring monthly users. The company says all user data will be deleted “promptly” after closing.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.