Redmond says it has agreed a transaction to purchase Bonsai, a Berkeley, California-based company. The AI specialist has been on Microsoft’s radar for some time. Indeed, Microsoft Ventures (recently rebranded as M12) previously invested in Bonsai. The company is known as a platform for training autonomous systems. Microsoft says integration with its own services make Bonsai an even more potent tool. “Bonsai’s platform combined with rich simulation tools and reinforcement learning work in Microsoft Research becomes the simplest and richest AI toolchain for building any kind of autonomous system for control and calibration tasks. “This toolchain will compose with Azure Machine Learning running on the Azure Cloud with GPUs and Brainwave, and models built with it will be deployed and managed in Azure IoT, giving Microsoft an end-to-end solution for building, operating and enhancing “brains” for autonomous systems.”
Recent Acquisitions
This month, Microsoft has been busy snapping up companies across various sectors. The splurge started with the $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub, which will be finalized later this year. This particular transaction will result in GitHub remaining an independent company. At its Xbox E3 event, Microsoft revealed it is acquiring four separate game developers. The company says the purchases will allow its to put more emphasis on creating first-party games and exclusives. Finally, Microsoft earlier this week announced it is buying Flipgrid. Flipgrid is a social learning service that has 20 million users in 180 countries. Students and educators who use the platform will receive a refund if they have a current subscription.
