Magic Pony Technology, a London-based AI startup, has been acquired by Twitter.
As part of the deal, Magic Pony’s team will be joining Twitter Cortex, a team of engineers, data scientists and machine learning researchers.
“Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we build at Twitter,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO and co-founder, adding:
“Magic Pony’s machine learning technology will help us build strength into our deep learning teams with world-class talent, so Twitter can continue to be the best place to see what’s happening and why it matters, first. We value deep learning research to help make our world better, and we will keep doing our part to share our work and learnings with the community.”
Rob Bishop, CEO and co-founder of Magic Pony, spoke about the acquisition:”Our team has researched and developed state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for visual processing that can identify the features of imagery and use that information to process it in new ways.
“Joining forces with Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring the benefits of that research to hundreds of millions of people around the world, and allows Magic Pony to contribute to better quality viewing experiences on Twitter,” added the CEO.
As part of the acquisition, Bishop will be based out of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, while co-founder Zehan Wang and the other team members will set up base at Twitter’s London office.
“London is an important engineering center for us, responsible for some of our highest priority product work, like live video,” said Jeremy Rishel, Twitter VP of engineering. “The Magic Pony team there will serve as the European base of the Twitter Cortex team and help recruit more top talent from the region.”
The news comes after Twitter acquired Madbits in July 2014 and Whetlab in June last year.
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