MetaMind acquired by Salesforce

It's very hard to find a viable business model in machine learning or AI tools and platforms at the moment: the size of the market is small, and most money is being made by the end users. As a result companies who could get value from AI want to own it themselves (to keep all of this money themselves). It's a little bit like everyone wanting to own their own data center full of servers in 1999; at some point it will seem silly, but it's hard to sell against because it's accepted wisdom.

Doing services is a reasonable response to that market dynamic, although they certainly had a product vision too.

Without knowing any of the details, I'd say they can be proud of what was accomplished and how they managed their exit: 1. From what I've heard, some of the work they did in the medical domain really did help save lives or make them better 2. They probably returned the capital to their investors and kept most of their employees 3. They didn't get bought by a company that would be horrible to work for or is in terminal decline

Credit where it's due: they entered a rough market and managed it well.

I think it is mainly an acquahire.

Metamind was always a services company. I may be wrong but they don't seem to have any product. They were going after contracts north of $250K for two month projects.

May be there is not much dough in consulting market.

I assume this page is soon to join the clan over on "Our Incredible Journey".

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

In this new environment, when I see an acquisition, I wonder if it was a forced one b/c of lack of VC funding.

"For unpaid web users, MetaMind's products will be discontinued on May 4. For our monthly recurring users, MetaMind's products will be discontinued on June 4."

All the best to the metamind team in their new adventure. For users of the metamind, Heuro Labs GmbH (Disclosure: I am the founder) offers a unified api for data mining supporting multiple modalities, streaming input directly from Social Media, etc. and built from the ground up to be a data fusion pipeline http://api.cognitio.heurolabs.com/#/signup Swagger docs: http://api.cognitio.heurolabs.com/assets/docs.html Wiki: https://heurolabs.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CogniDoc/Overvi... Demo: http://web.cognitio.heurolabs.com/

As usual, folks that make breakthroughs in science have a hard time commercializing their tech. In this case, the team behind Metamind will make off a lot better than William Shockley did, though this definitely seems like an acquihire.

I wonder how much did Benioff being on the board have to do with this?

I wonder where Salesforce is going to integrate MetaMind's technology. From afar, the overlapping use cases aren't obvious.