
MetaMind acquired by Salesforce - brianchu
https://www.metamind.io/salesforce-acquisition
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barneso
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.

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zeeshanm
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.

~~~
mathattack
Consulting doesn't scale as well, because you need people to do the work. In
theory, with an product, you only need people to sell it. The cost of selling
software is expensive, but still much less than the cost of delivery
consulting.

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

[http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

~~~
taneq
That is the most depressing thing I've seen all week.

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

~~~
nl
MetaMind would have been able to raise any amount of money they wanted. Any
sensible VC knows that Richard Socher is as close to a sure bet as it is
possible to get.

~~~
dkincaid
A sure bet for what? Metamind as a company failed.

~~~
nl
What makes you say that?

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ar7hur
"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."

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heuroci
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](http://api.cognitio.heurolabs.com/#/signup)
Swagger docs:
[http://api.cognitio.heurolabs.com/assets/docs.html](http://api.cognitio.heurolabs.com/assets/docs.html)
Wiki:
[https://heurolabs.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CogniDoc/Overvi...](https://heurolabs.atlassian.net/wiki/display/CogniDoc/Overview)
Demo: [http://web.cognitio.heurolabs.com/](http://web.cognitio.heurolabs.com/)

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kalekam
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.

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

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

~~~
taneq
"With MetaMind and Salesforce coming together, we'll be able to offer
customers real AI solutions with breakthrough capabilities that further
automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many
other business processes."

They want conversational AI for phone support, cold calling, etc.

~~~
sologoub
There is a lot more than that - just reading case filed to understand what the
request is about is tough. There are many ways humans can be augmented by
modest AI. SFDC has so many products within their various clouds where even
modest, but accurate classification could be a gold mine.

Personally, I think we are fairly far away from fully conversant customer
support that is fully automated, yet sounds human enough. Most people today do
not yet like talking to machines.

