Whetlab has only been around for roughly a year, but its technology—which is aimed at making machine learning “better and faster for companies, automatically”—was valuable enough to pique the interest of one social media titan. Today, Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) announced that it has acquired the Cambridge startup, whose founders include several at Harvard. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
We’ve acquired @whetlab to accelerate Twitter’s machine learning efforts. https://t.co/wGXuHUc36a
— Twitter Engineering (@TwitterEng) June 17, 2015
Twitter has offered limited details on how Whetlab will benefit the firm. But a source close to Twitter claims that Whetlab’s technology will be used as an internal service to accelerate Twitter’s current machine learning efforts, according to Venture Beat. Twitter was also also apparently interested in Whetlab’s five-person team because of their “extensive” machine learning expertise, particularly in regards to deep learning and artificial intelligence. On its website, Whetlab stated: “Twitter is the platform for open communication on the Internet and we believe that Whetlab’s technology can have a huge and positive impact through it.” A spokesperson for Twitter told Bostinno that the Whetlab team will be joining the social media company's Cambridge, Mass. office.
Because of the acquisition, Whetlab will be shutting down its closed beta July 15. However, existing users will still be able to download the data from their previous experiments.
Whetlab was founded by Ryan Adams, Hugo Larochelle, Jasper Snoek, Kevin Swersky and Alex Wiltschko. Adams attended MIT for EECS, received his PhD in physics at Cambridge University, and works as an assistant professor at Harvard in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Snoek is a CRCS postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and Wiltschko is a Harvard PhD student studying neurobiology.
The startup’s technology webpage offers a glimpse at their mission:
Rather than having to hire doctorate-wielding machine learning experts to architect and tune your system, our patent-pending technology helps your engineers — your team that already understands your data and your needs — get the latest and greatest deep learning techniques going in days rather than months or years.
Moreover, Whetlab doesn’t just replicate expert capabilities, it exceeds them: our technology has repeatedly outperformed the top machine learning researchers in configuring systems for the hardest cutting-edge problems, setting the state of the art for benchmarks in challenging domains such as visual object recognition, speech processing, and computational biology.
BostInno has reached out to Twitter rep for insight into the acquisition, and will update with any additional information when it becomes available.
