A tech firm with a growing Durham operation has acquired a machine-learning platform and is creating jobs in the Triangle.
CloudFactory, a British firm with its North American headquarters at Durham’s American Underground, has acquired Hasty, a platform aimed at helping companies build and deploy vision Ai applications faster and more reliably.
Financial details were not disclosed.
CloudFactory CEO Mark Sears said the firm got to know Hasty as a partner first.
“We, in many ways, talk about CloudFactory being the picks and shovels that help AI teams dig for gold in terms of getting data they need to train their models,” he told Triangle Business Journal. “So we bring in different tools and technology partners. Hasty was one of the partners we brought in.”
CloudFactory offers what it describes as “human-powered data processing.” It allows companies to outsource routine, back-office work through its global workforce.
The company was “impressed,” both with its team and its capabilities. So about a year ago, conversations about an acquisition got serious. Thursday, the deal became official via an all-hands announcement.
It’s the second acquisition for CloudFactory, and the firm hasn’t ruled out future deals as part of its strategy, particularly amid the current economic environment, where valuations have started to fall from sky-high price tags seen last year.
Priority one is integrating Hasty and “maximizing the opportunity.”
“Like a lot of companies, we’re looking at this next season and seeing how can we bring more pieces to the technology stack,” he said.
And it can afford to be strategic.
CloudFactory, which counts companies like Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Mitsubishi as clients, continues to be well-capitalized, with plenty of “gas in the tank” from the firm’s $65 million growth equity raise in 2019, Sears said.
“The last five years have been 10-times growth and that has kept us pretty busy,” he said.
A history of outsourcing
The firm began a decade ago with about two dozen cloud workers in Nepal doing data entry. Over the years that outsourcing team swelled to thousands of workers in Nepal and Kenya. According to the company, its "human-in-the-loop AI solutions" are now powered by an outsourced workforce of more than 7,000 data analysts.
Companies can subscribe to its platform, accessing remote teams for a variety of purposes – from General Motors (NYSE: GM), which has deployed a team for autonomous vehicle work; to ESPN (NYSE: DIS), which has utilized CloudFactory for transcription services.
With the addition of Hasty, new product offerings are likely on the way, he said. Combined with CloudFactory’s global workforce, the deal gives clients components needed to accelerate the development of a plethora of high-performing models, Sears said. Integrating Hasty’s Ai-assisted labeling and data-centric platform with CloudFactory’s "human-in-the-loop AI software" will bring machine learning models into production faster, according to the company.
Sears elaborated on the deal in a blog post this week, saying that “after lagging behind expectations for a long time, AI is ready to be adopted at scale thanks to data-centric AI.”
CloudFactory has about 100 employees in the U.S., primarily in the Triangle. It continues to hire in the region, particularly in product marketing, client success and sales roles.