8-year-old startup Automated Insights(Ai), has been acquired by Vista Equity Partners as a subsidiary of STATS LLC. Automated Insights have been innovating with natural language generation and artificial intelligence to glean patterns in big data and turn them into readable narratives.
“We aren’t disclosing the amount, but I will say two things about the financials,” said Robbie Allen, CEO and founder of Automated Insights, in an email to TechCrunch. “Our shareholders are very happy with their return, and we were already in a strong financial position.”
Wordsmith, Ai’s natural language generation platform, will see further investment as a followup of the acquisition, as Vista’s resources and STATS’ distribution will allow its growth across multiple industries including sports, business intelligence, media, personal fitness, healthcare, and beyond, according to an Ai blog post.
Stats will utilise Automated Insights’ technology on its silos of underutilized sports data.
Gary Walrath, Stats chief executive, told the Washington Post. “With the technology of artificial intelligence you’ll be covering things in ways you didn’t think of before. I think there is probably a lot of applicability for this and other areas that are going to surprise us after we do the obvious, low-hanging fruit.” He said that only 15 percent of sports it gathers data on gets transformed into editorial content.
Vista, which has over $14 billion in cumulative capital commitments, acquired STATS LLC, a sports statistics and information outfit, earlier last year, in June. Ai which has had dealings with STATS LLC since 2007 raised $5.5 million in a Series B round last year through investors like the AP, Samsung, and Steve Case.
It has been reported that existing customers will not see any changes and Ai is hiring in order to support the expansion.
(Image credit: Automated Insights)
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