MetaMind
MetaMind was a deep learning company co-founded by Richard SocherRichard SocherRichard Socher is an AI researcher, entrepreneur and investor. He is co-founder and CEO of Recursive, founder and CEO of You.com, and co-founder and managing partner of AIX Ventures. A Stanford computer science PhD, he contributed to the Stanford Sentiment Treebank and GloVe, founded MetaMind, and served as chief scientist at Salesforce.Open the full entry and Sven StrohbandSven StrohbandSven Strohband is an engineer, entrepreneur and venture investor, and a partner and managing director at Khosla Ventures. He helped lead the Stanley autonomous-car project and co-founded MetaMind with Richard Socher.Open the full entry. It offered text and image analysis and was acquired by SalesforceSalesforceSalesforce is a U.S. enterprise software company headquartered in San Francisco, providing cloud applications, data platforms and AI agent tools centered on customer relationship management (CRM).Open the full entry in 2016.
Contents6 sections
Key facts
2014Team and platform
MetaMind launched publicly on December 5, 2014, with Sven Strohband as CEO, Richard Socher as CTO and $8 million in initial funding from Khosla VenturesKhosla VenturesKhosla Ventures (KV) is an American venture capital firm founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, and headquartered in Menlo Park, California. It made heavy early bets on clean technology, became OpenAI’s first venture capital investor in 2019, and its portfolio also includes companies such as DoorDash, Block (formerly Square), Impossible Foods, and Rocket Lab.Open the full entry and Marc Benioff.[1]
Product focus: Text and image prediction
The platform applied NLP and computer vision to business classification, prediction and decision-making, enabling organizations to build models with their own data.[1]
Research background: Recursive and memory models
Socher’s recursive-network research formed part of the company’s technical background. Related researchers continued studying textual and visual question answering, including dynamic-memory-network work by Caiming XiongCaiming XiongCaiming Xiong is an AI researcher and co-founder of Recursive, formerly senior vice president of AI research at Salesforce.Open the full entry, Stephen Merity and Socher.[2][1]
April 2016Salesforce acquisition
Salesforce acquired MetaMind in April 2016, planning to integrate its deep learning technology for applications such as marketing automation and personalization. Socher became Salesforce’s chief scientist.[3]
May–June 2016: Original services discontinued
The acquisition transition included discontinuing free-user services on May 4 and paid-user services on June 4 while continuing AI research. MetaMind subsequently ceased operating its original platform independently.[3]
Sources
- MetaMind Launches State-of-the-Art AI Platform, Bringing Automated Predictions and Smarter Decision-Making to Businesses (opens in a new window)
- Dynamic Memory Networks for Visual and Textual Question Answering (opens in a new window)
- Salesforce buys AI specialist MetaMind to avoid being ‘flanked’ (opens in a new window)