Friday, March 29

Walmart Labs makes its Second Acqui-hire in India with an AI Firm

The retail giant Walmart has made its second acqui-hire in India, with a machine learning startup called Int.AI. The acquisition is being done to strengthen its technology team in the country.

This will mark as the company second aqui-hire in the country. Prior to this, Walmart acqui-hired micro-app startup Appsfly in September, merging that six-member team with its customer experience engineering group.

“We announced one and we just did our second one. It’s called Int.AI,” Jeremy King, executive vice president and chief technology at Walmart said.

Int.AI operates in the field of data analytics and machine learning. The platform has built capabilities in analysing data and sharing it with targeted users over email as well as collaborative tools like Slack among others.

Founded in 2016 by Praneeth Babu Doguparthy and Vinay NP, the startup wants to automate the role of a business analyst using natural language programming and advanced clustering algorithms.

“We are going to bring them in and add them to the customer technology team. The team is three people and they are really young, ambitious people,” Hari Vasudev, Country Head andVice President – Technology at Walmart Labs India, said.

Earlier this year, Walmart stated that it is looking at three-to-five startup acquisitions a year in India. The company had dedicated teams vet the potential acquisition targets and the company was revving the acquisition engine.

Large companies, both inIndia and global, are increasingly looking at acqui-hires, where little or nomoney is paid in order to bring in startup entreprenuers and their employees. This is being done where a dearth of talent is spurring larger companies to buyout smaller rivals to access their engineers.