Startup Street: Google's First Indian Acquisition Is A 4-Month Old Startup

Little is known about the young startup except that its founder and CEO, Pankaj Gupta, was the former chief technology and product officer of the now defunct Stayzilla. He also did a five-year stint at Twitter, working on personalisation and recommendation engines for the social media platform. Halli Labs will be joining Google's Next Billion Users team, which is part of its bet to expand its services to non-English speaking users from India. Such users, according to a study it co-authored with KPMG, will form nine out of the ten new internet users coming online. Google has increasingly emphasised how important AI and machine learning is to them.