Microsoft has acquired Maluuba, a Montreal-based deep learning company working on natural language understanding. In a blog post, Harry Shum, executive vice president, Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, said Maluuba’s expertise in deep learning and reinforcement learning for question-answering and decision-making systems will help the company advance its strategy to democratize AI and to make it accessible.

Sam Pasupalak and his Maluuba co-founder, Kaheer Suleman will be joining Microsoft. Yoshua Bengio, head of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms and an advisor to Maluuba, will also be advising Microsoft. Talking about the acquisition in a blog post, the Maluuba founders said Microsoft’s vision of “democratizing AI to empower every person and every organization on the planet fundamentally aligns with how we see our technology being used.”

[Image courtesy: Maluuba]