Google has acquired Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence start-up Halli Labs. Halli, which means 'village' in Kannada, has announced the news in a blog post which was later confirmed by Google. "Welcome @Pankaj and the team at @halli_labs to Google. Looking forward in building some cool stuff together," tweeted Google's Vice President, Product Managment, Caesar Sengupta.

The start-up, founded by Pankaj Gupta, is focused on building deep learning and machine learning systems. "We are thrilled to share the news that the Halli Labs team is joining Google," the firm said in a blog post.

Gupta is a data scientist with an interesting history that includes running recommendation and personalisation at Twitter and a role as CTO at now-defunct Indian Airbnb rival Stayzilla, among other entrepreneurial ventures.

"Halli Labs was founded with the goal of applying modern AI and ML techniques to old problems and domains in order to help technology enable people to do whatever it is that they want to do, easier and better," the post added.

"Well, what better place than Google to help us achieve this goal. We will be joining Google's 'Next Billion Users' team to help get more technology and information into more people's hands around the world. We couldn't be more excited!" wrote the Halli Labs team.

"We are excited that the Halli Labs team is joining Google. They'll be joining our team that is focused on building products that are designed for the next billion users coming online, particularly in India," Google said in a statement.

By Premji