Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., is on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the company’s initial public offering on Thursday, March 2, 2017.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images
LONDON – Snap, the parent company of the social media app Snapchat, has acquired a British artificial intelligence startup called Ariel AI, which focuses on augmented reality.
Ariel AI was founded in London in 2018 by a group of former research scientists from Google and Facebook, including chief executive Iasonas Kokkinos and chief technology officer George Papandreou. The news was first reported by Business Insider and confirmed to CNBC by Snap on Tuesday.
Prior to the acquisition of Snap, Ariel AI had raised $ 1.1 million in investor financing, according to Crunchbase. Snap declined to comment on the price of the new deal, but it is probably in the millions of single digits.
Artificial intelligence can be defined as intelligence demonstrated by machines, while augmented reality is a technology that involves the overlap of digital content and information in the physical world.
Ariel AI has focused on an area of AI known as computer vision, which is used to build augmented reality resources.
The start-up’s website claims that its software allows “3D human perception” in real time and can be used to power “the next generation of consumer experiences on mobile devices”.
A YouTube demo video shows how the company’s technology can render a 3D model of a person in real time. The model can then be used to try on virtual clothes and engaging games.
Snap told CNBC that the Ariel AI team joined their computer vision team in London in late 2020.
The 12 engineers at the start-up were tasked with making the Snapchat camera “smarter” and improving the augmented reality experiences that allow Snapchat users to engage with the real world.
Snap said his work will focus on understanding geometry, semantics and more of what is in the camera’s field of view.
Nathan Benaich, an AI investor at Air Street Capital and co-author of the annual State of AI report, told CNBC he was not surprised that Snap bought Ariel AI.
“That was my bet, actually,” he said, adding that Facebook, Samsung and Pokémon Go maker Niantic were other candidates for him.
Benaich said he thinks Snap bought Ariel because it is “focused on building 3D mesh on the device in a fast and battery efficient way with an AR use case”.
He also said that Snap probably also bought the company for the talent it has in its workforce.
Social media companies like TikTok and Facebook are struggling to develop the most sophisticated AR experiences for their users. They range from dog ears that people can superimpose on top of their heads to other special effects.
US technology firms have acquired several British AI start-ups in recent years. The best-known example is Google buying DeepMind for $ 600 million in 2014. Elsewhere, Twitter bought Magic Pony Technology for $ 150 million, while Facebook bought Bloomsbury AI in a deal of up to $ 30 millions.
Snap also bought a start-up called Voisey last November, which developed an app that allows people to superimpose their own voice on small music tracks.