Salesforce acquires MetaMind

MetaMind, a Palo Alto-based AI startup founded in July 2014, is being acquired by Salesforce. According to a new post published at the company's website by CEO Richard Socher -- a Stanford PhD who studied machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision -- Salesforce plans to use its technology to "further automate and personalize customer support, marketing automation, and many other business processes. Salesforce confirmed the deal but isn't disclosing financial details of the transaction or commenting on whether MetaMind's entire team will join its ranks. As a standalone company, MetaMind's general-purpose platform was designed to predict outcomes for language, vision and database tasks. As of the middle of last year, its technology could reportedly answer everything from specific queries about snippets of text to the sentiment of that text.