Perhaps rightly, there has long been a perception that Google-owned Deepmind has been the most aggressive in hoovering up a lot of the U.K.’s best talent in artificial intelligence, but now Facebook appears to be turning its eye to the country.

TechCrunch understands that the social network behemoth is acquiring London-based Bloomsbury AI, a startup that has built natural language processing (NLP) technology to help machines answer questions based on information gleaned from documents. According to sources, Facebook plans to deploy the company’s team and tech to work on combatting fake news and to tackle other content issues.

Bloomsbury is an alumni of Entrepreneur First, the company builder that invests in technical and domain expertise talent and helps those individuals start companies. The startup is also backed by Fly.VC, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, UCL Technology Fund, and the U.K. tax payer-funded London Co-investment Fund.

William Tunstall-Pedoe, who was instrumental in the development of Amazon’s AI-powered digital assistant Alexa, is also an angel investor in Bloomsbury.

Multiple sources say Facebook is paying between $23 million and $30 million to acquire Bloomsbury AI, in a deal that will see a mixture of cash and stock change hands. In one scenario, the startup’s investors will receive around $5.5 million, with Bloomsbury’s founding team in line for the remaining $17.5 million, paid in restricted Facebook stock. Either way, this represents a modest return for the bulk of investors, although EF — given that it invests pre-seed — is likely to have had a larger multiple.

Given the price and the stage Bloomsbury AI were at, the acquisition also has more than a whiff of acqui-hire to it, although there is some IP in the deal. I understand from one source that Bloomsbury AI’s CTO/Head of Research, Sebastian Riedel, was the biggest draw. He is considered to be a leading expert in the area of NLP, and is a professor at UCL. According to his LinkedIn, he also co-founded and is an advisor to Factmata, the U.K. startup that purports to have developed tools to help brands combat “fake news”.

Which brings us to the possible reason for why Facebook is acquiring Bloomsbury AI, a startup that I’m told was phenomenally strong when viewed as a group of researchers, but less so when it comes to getting a commercially viable product out of the door. The company’s sole product is an API called Cape that lets developers add question & answer functionality to websites and other documents.

Indeed, a source who claims to have some knowledge of Facebook’s intentions says the U.S. tech giant may be planning to put the Bloomsbury AI team on the task of helping it develop technology to fight fake news on the platform and solve other aspects of its glaring moderation problem.

Other areas of Facebook’s product that might benefit from the Q&A technology that powers Cape include being used as a workplace tool for companies to discover content in documents, or on Facebook’s consumer offering as a way of significantly improving its search and knowledge-base functionality.

It is also understood that Bloomsbury AI being based in London was a factor, as Facebook aims to have an AI presence in the U.K. capital city and is thought to be sourcing further acquisitions here.

Multiple sources have confirmed the deal to us, although Facebook declined to comment.

Additional reporting by Ingrid Lunden

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Facebook is buying UK’s Bloomsbury AI to ramp up natural language tech in London

Kasaz, a new startup from Sebastien Marion — who founded Comufy, which was acquired by games company King in 2014 for a minimum of $11.8 million — is on a mission to bring much-needed transparency and a better user experience to the Spanish real-estate market. The company has built a property online marketplace that makes it easy to list properties for sale and for buyers to access the information required to know if a property is worth viewing and potentially making an offer.

“Looking for a property in Spain, and more generally in continental Europe is an ordeal,” Marion, who co-founded Kasaz with Idriss Farhat, tells me. “There are many friction points and the typical time to completion is over four months. When one decides to buy a flat, one would typically start on one of the leading real-estate portals. From a foreigner’s perspective, however, the quality of the leading real-estate platforms in Spain is shocking”.

To help with this, each listing on Kasaz is verified, as are prospective buyers, and duplicate listings from competing agencies are prohibited. The Kasaz platform also lets buyers and sellers communicate with each other, including the ability to book viewings online, and provides additional services such as professional photography, video or 3D tours, and professionally written property descriptions.

“Compared to the leading U.K. platforms, such as Rightmove and Zoopla, it feels like Spain’s leading real-estate portals have been frozen for a decade,” continues Marion. “For example, seeing a list of property for sale in Barcelona on Idealista.com, the leading real-estate portal in Spain, will require a minimum of 7 clicks versus 2 in Zoopla. Worse, you will see no statistics about the area, no trends, no information about past sale prices nor nearby transport systems, schools etc”.

In contrast, Kasaz claims to provide the most accurate location and property information and Marion says that where that isn’t possible, properties are rejected. The site also displays more general information about an area, such as transport links and other amenities e.g. shopping, transport and sightseeing possibilities.

“House buyers in Spain are tired of being misled. Thanks to the quality of information available in Kasaz, a buyer can analyse the whole market in a fraction of the time it took in the past. Our mobile app even allows you to visualise the real properties for sale around you, something that until today has not been possible due to the low quality of the information,” he adds.

Since launching 6 months ago, Kasaz claims to already list nearly half of the unique inventory available for sale in Barcelona and says it works with over 100 agencies. The startup plans on expanding to the rest of Spain shortly, with Madrid up next.

It makes money by charging real-estate agencies a monthly fee to list on the platform, while individual home-owners can list for free. “Both agencies and home-owners can also buy extra services such as 3D virtual tours, 360° professional videos, Facebook lives, or professional photos,” explains the Kasaz founder.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Kasaz wants to make it less painful to buy or sell a home in Spain