Twitter Acquires Machine Learning Company Whetlab

Twitter Inc TWTR on Wednesday announced it acquired machine learning company Whetlab.

Terms of the deal were not yet disclosed, but both companies made the transaction official on their Twitter feeds. While Twitter did reveal its plans regarding machine learning initiatives, it did say Whetlab will “accelerate” its machine learning efforts.

According to VentureBeat, a person familiar with the issue said Twitter is also interested in Whetlab’s five-person team for their “extensive” machine learning expertise.

About Whetlab

Whetlab has been around for almost a year, developing a “technology to make machine learning better and faster for companies, automatically,” its site states. The company adds that “Twitter is the platform for open communication on the internet” and believe Whetlab’s technology “can have a great impact by accelerating Twitter’s internal machine learning efforts.”

The startup we will be shutting down its closed beta in about one month on July 15, and is accepting no new signups, even for users with a beta code.

To better understand what machine learning is and what Whetlab does, check out its site's tech section: “If you can tell Whetlab what it means to do well on your problem, e.g., ‘I want better accuracy in face detection,’ it can automatically make these decisions for you with very little extra work. It gives you better performance than the experts could provide, and in less time. In research terms, this process is called hyperparameter optimization, and Whetlab is the most sophisticated and successful software in the world for doing it.”