Bloomsbury AI

Bloomsbury AI was a London-based artificial intelligence startup founded in 2015 by Guillaume Bouchard, Luis Ulloa, and Sebastian Riedel. The company specialized in natural language processing (NLP) and developed technology to read and comprehend unstructured text documents, enabling users to ask complex questions and receive immediate answers. The firm originated as a spin-off from a machine reading research group at University College London, maintaining a strong focus on research and development.

The company's core product was an API named Cape, which provided powerful machine reading and reasoning capabilities. Cape allowed developers to integrate question-answering functionality into their own applications and websites, converting text into knowledge through deep learning neural network models. This technology was designed to serve various industries, including large firms like legal practices, by enabling them to interrogate vast quantities of documents efficiently. The system was notable for its ability to improve over time by collecting annotations and re-training its models for specific use cases. Bloomsbury AI received support from investors and programs such as Entrepreneur First, Seedcamp, IQ Capital, and UCL Technology Fund.

In July 2018, Facebook (now Meta) acquired the Bloomsbury AI team for an estimated $23-$30 million. The acquisition was aimed at strengthening Facebook's own NLP research efforts and helping to combat the spread of fake news and moderate content on its platforms. Following the acquisition, the Bloomsbury AI team joined Facebook's AI research lab in London. The company later open-sourced its Cape technology to allow others to benefit from their work before ceasing operations.

Keywords: natural language processing, machine reading, question answering, deep learning, AI API, text analytics, unstructured data, document comprehension, information extraction, semantic search, AI research, NLP models, fake news detection, content moderation, knowledge conversion, extractive question answering, text understanding, reasoning systems, machine intelligence, Entrepreneur First