Microsoft acquires Indian-American's messaging app maker
Microsoft has acquired a California-based app maker, Wand Labs, founded by an Indian.
The Tech-giant Microsoft has acquired a California-based app maker, Wand Labs, founded by an Indian, marking that the acquisition will strengthen its position in the emerging era of conversational intelligence.
Started in 2013 by an IIT-Delhi alumnus Vishal Sharma, Wand Labs has built messaging technology for apps. Under their acquisition, Microsoft is looking forward to build on and extend the power of Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platform to empower developers everywhere.
In a blogpost, David Ku, corporate vice president of Information Platform Group of Microsoft said, ‘This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for Conversation as a Platform, which Satya Nadella introduced at our ‘Build 2016’ conference in March.’
He added,’ The Wand team's expertise around semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration and conventional interfaces make them a great fit to join the Bing engineering and platform team, especially when the work we are doing in the area of intelligent and chat bots.’
The CEO of Wand Labs, Vishal Sharma confirmed the acquisition on its website, and said, ‘Our deep experience with semantics, messaging and authority are a natural fit for the work already underway at Microsoft, especially in the area of intelligent agents and cognitive services.’