Facebook acquires language processing startup Bloomsbury AI

Facebook has announced that it has agreed to acquire a London-based technology company called Bloomsbury AI in an effort to bolster its language processing capabilities.

Backed by IQ Capital, UCL Technology fund and a number of other investors, Bloomsbury AI has developed software that it claims can read text documents and answer questions about the content, driven by an overriding emphasis on natural language processing.

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“The Bloomsbury team has built a leading expertise in machine reading and understanding unstructured documents in natural language in order to answer any question,” said Facebook.

“Their expertise will strengthen Facebook’s efforts in natural language processing research, and help us further understand natural language and its applications.”

Facebook also revealed that the acquisition will help to expand its presence in London, with the Bloomsbury AI experts set to join Facebook’s existing team situated there.

“We look forward to welcoming them to Facebook and we can't wait to see what we build together,” the company continued.

Although the company itself provided no exact figures, a range of sources have cited figures varying between $23mn and $30mn, giving an indication as to the size of the deal.