Microsoft Acquires Wand Labs

Just days after news broke of its blockbuster $26 billion acquisition of business social networking site LinkedIn, Microsoft last week announced its acquisition of messaging app developer Wand Labs. Financial terms of that deal were not disclosed.

Microsoft expects to incorporate Wand Labs’ technology and talent into its work with conversational intelligence and to extend the Bing, Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Windows platforms.

"This acquisition accelerates our vision and strategy for Conversation as a Platform, which [CEO] Satya Nadella introduced at our Build 2016 conference in March," David Ku, corporate vice president of the Information Platform Group at Microsoft,  wrote in a blog post dated June 16. "The Wand team's expertise around semantic ontologies, services mapping, third-party developer integration and conversational interfaces make them a great fit to join the Bing engineering and platform team, especially with the work we're doing in the area of intelligent agents and chat bots."

"The work we've been doing with predictive assistance and delegated authority is at the leading edge of a broader technology shift that is redefining the information industry," Vishal Sharma, founder and CEO of Wand Labs, wrote in a blog. "I'm proud of the work my team has done and what we've already accomplished in this emerging space, and I'm delighted to be joining a company that shares our passion and enthusiasm for this new era where conversation is the central focus. Making experiences for customers more seamless by harnessing human language is a powerful vision and one that motivates me and my team."

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