Maluuba
| Subsidiary | |
| Industry | Artificial Intelligence, Natural language processing |
| Founded |
Waterloo, Ontario (2011) |
| Founder | Sam Pasupalak Kaheer Suleman Zhiyuan Wu Joshua Pantony |
| Headquarters | Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Parent | Microsoft Corporation |
| Website | www |
Maluuba is a Canadian artificial intelligence company conducting research in deep and reinforcement learning. The company vision is to solve fundamental problems in language understanding with a goal towards solving artificial general intelligence. This technology will allow machines to understand and answer questions about written documents, and have natural conversations with users. In late March 2016, the company made headlines by demonstrating a machine reading system capable of answering arbitrary questions about J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Their natural language understanding technology has been adopted by major consumer electronic brands like LG and can be found on over 50 million devices shipping globally in the smart phone, smart TV and IoT space.
Founded in 2011, the company was acquired by Microsoft in 2017.
Maluuba was founded by two undergraduate students from the University of Waterloo, Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman. Their initial proof of concept was a voice activated travel tool that allowed users to search for flights using their voice.
In February 2012, the company secured $2 million in seed funding from Samsung Ventures. Within the span of 6 months following the investment, the company built out an engineering team, technology platform and Android personal assistant application that rivalled Siri and Google Now in terms of functionality. In September of that year, Maluuba officially launched their Android application as a finalist on stage at the Techcrunch Disrupt.
Having noticed the launch and early market success of personal assistants like Siri and Google Now, consumer electronics companies and other device makers became interested in incorporating the technology into their products. Since 2013, Maluuba has partnered with several companies in the smart phone, smart TV, automotive and IoT space. For instance, Maluuba's personal assistant technology powers LG's VoiceMate application found on the company's flagship G series smartphones.
Maluuba's vision from the beginning has been to bring human level literacy to machines. In August 2015 Maluuba secured a $9 million of Series A investment from Nautilus Ventures and Emerllion Capital. Then in December 2015, Maluuba opened an R&D lab in Montreal, Quebec, widely considered one of the epicentres for deep learning research.
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