Software giant Microsoft announced on Thursday that it had helped fund two artificial intelligence startups, Agolo and Bonsai, in order to diversify its reach into the Artifical Intelligence sector.
The investments represent a move away from its own software and into the tech startup world. The announcement comes just six months after Microsoft’s investment arm, Microsoft Ventures, invested in Element AI, an AI research lab and incubator based in Montreal.
Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president at Microsoft Ventures, said Agolo’s technology aligns with Microsoft’s focus on “empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more”.
California-based Bonsai creates software that allows for the automated management of machine learning algorithms and libraries and Agolo is a New York City software maker that uses contextual AI to analyze content and distill it into summaries, delivering key points to users depending on their interests.
“By applying its summarization system to news, chat, voice and video content, Agolo enables efficient consumption of large amounts of data, increasing productivity in the workplace,” Kashyap wrote in a blog post.
“The company’s AI platform can analyze thousands of documents and produce a summary of key points, specific to the user’s interests, in real time,” he concluded.