Recently, for an undisclosed amount, the local language technology platform from Bangalore, VerSe Innovation announced that the company has acquired Bangalore-based AI startup Cognirel Technologies for AI and deep learning-based research.
According to sources, the company’s newly instituted AI lab will be focussing on improving as well as developing new computer vision and deep learning models to understand the video content in terms of their visual, audio, semantic and socio-linguistic aspects. Thus enabling better user recommendations and experiences on the existing platforms.
As a part of the acquisition, Ram Prakash, who is the founder of Cognirel Technologies, will now head its newly instituted AI Lab, while the team of scientists at Cognirel will join the firm.
The AI lab will also pursue neuroscience-inspired reinforcement learning experiments to understand user taste-profiles, using non-intrusive and implicit behavioural signals, to boost engagement and utility for users.
Virendra Gupta and Umang Bedi, founder and co-founder respectively of VerSe Innovation stated, “With this acquisition, we move a step further on our strategic expansion path for our family of apps focused on Bharat. He (Ram Prakash) comes armed with an exceptional team and the expertise that we believe will create true impact for local language users through the reach and scale of Dailyhunt and Josh.”
Commenting on the statement, Ram Prakash stated, “The best of AI/ML approaches today can’t be readily applied to Indian languages without the availability of high quality labelled data. Current approaches are data-hungry and for solving Indian language NLP/NLU tasks, we don’t have labelled data.” Prakash added, “We will employ hybrid approaches that combine deep learning-based cross-lingual transfer learning techniques with classical computational linguistics models to alleviate the need for large labelled data.”
At the starting of this month, the parent company of news aggregator Dailyhunt and short video platform Josh has raised more than $100 Million in a funding round led by Qatar Investment Authority, the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar and Glade Brook Capital Partners.
