Walmart is on an acquisition spree, and after data analytics startup Int.AI’s acquisition, it has now acquired Bengaluru-based machine learning startup Dataturks. Founded in 2018 by ex-Flipkart Executives Mohan Gupta and Gajendra Dadheech, the startup works in the area of creating datasets for companies and researchers. Within a short span of time, the startup had shown some significant growth with around 35 clients in its kitty from areas like healthcare and legal tech and had also earlier raised a seed-stage fund from Axilor accelerator.

Why The Acquisition?

As Walmart is looking to ramp up the tech and product team in India, it is stressing on technologies such as data science and machine learning. “A lot of work is happening in machine learning and data science out of India office. This is where we come into the picture and are helping them accelerate ML development,” Dadheech told to Analytics India Magazine.

Walmart Labs wants to make use of Dataturks’ ML capabilities to the fullest and is apparently looking to use the startup’s machine learning strengths in various projects for the digital arm of the US-based major, Walmart stores. Their deep domain expertise in ML and large application development experience will help Walmart to drive further innovations in its various merchandising platforms such as catalogue quality, anomaly detection, search innovation and more.

The five-membered team of Dataturks have already joined Walmart Labs, working as a part of their merchant technology division. The DataTurks team will work from the India office, as told to AIM.

Walmart is ambitious about strengthening its data science and ML portfolio and has in the past acqui-hired Int.AI to set a stronger foot in India and help build solutions for supporting large scale business. Its another important acquisition was that of Appsfly.

This acquisition aligns with the fact that Walmart is aggressively looking to expand engineering team and tech acquisition in India, as it is reportedly looking to hire more than 1000 people in India, mainly in the areas of machine learning, merchandise, supply chain, data science, product managers and cloud experts.

What Is Dataturks?

The startup provides an online platform where users can upload their dataset, choose the annotation task such as classification, and invite their team for tagging. The founders started it to help ML developers and researchers create datasets. “Creating datasets is always a challenge and the teams have to build their own in-house tools to do it. With Dataturks you just have to sign up and we will help create datasets for you, Gupta had shared in an earlier interaction with AIM. Dataturks was founded by the duo after having faced similar problems in their earlier jobs while creating models for search, ranking and more.

The team had earlier shared that they aim to create millions of open source code in their platform just the way Github has. “We want to be a go-to place for great datasets,” Gupta had shared.

With the Walmart acquisition, the Dataturks team will be accelerating machine learning use cases for Walmart Labs. “We still have that vision to make ML use cases for people and with Walmart, we can do it much faster. For us making ML accessible for everyone has been the objective always, this acquisition aligns with that objective given what Walmart Labs India is doing the ML field,” said Dadheech.