Reddit announced On Friday, it is acquiring MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company, for an undisclosed amount. The MeaningCloud team has joined Reddit and will support machine learning projects across its product, security and advertising teams. The acquisition marks Reddit’s first office in Spain.
MeaningCloud was founded in 2015 and specializes in extracting meaning from unstructured content such as social conversations and web content. Reddit says the company’s technology will enhance its machine learning skills and understanding of unstructured data to provide Reddit users with relevant information.
“MeaningCloud helps strengthen the Reddit platform by helping our community get the information they want even faster,” Jack Hanlon, vice president of data at Reddit, said in a statement. “With the addition of MeaningClound technology, we can continue our mission to provide our users with simpler, richer and more relevant content. We are excited to welcome the talented MeaningCloud team to Reddit.”
The company says today’s announcement coincides with its recent acquisition of Spell, a machine learning experimentation platform. Spell was founded by former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino in 2016 to provide a cloud computing solution that allows anyone to run resource-intensive ML experiments without requiring the high-end hardware that would normally be necessary.
Reddit currently uses machine learning for personalized recommendations and the Discover tab, which the app introduced this year. The company also uses this technology for job security and targeted advertising.
Between today’s announcement and the company’s recent acquisition of Spell, Reddit seems to be focusing on investing in artificial intelligence. The company recently said that part of its mission is to ensure that the artificial intelligence it works on is lucid and does not perpetuate bias.
Reddit buys machine learning platform Spell