Cisco agreed to acquire MindMeld, a start-up based in San Franciso that is developing a conversational platform based on natural language understanding (NLU). The deal was valued at $125 million in cash and assumed equity awards. The acquisition is expected to close in Cisco’s fourth quarter of fiscal year 2017.
The MindMeld platform can be used for building intelligent conversational interfaces for companies to interact with their customers across almost any device or application. MindMeld is able to ingest customer data and create a highly accurate and customized natural language model, tailored to each company’s industry and requirements. MindMeld also delivers a dialog manager that enables a computer to respond to user requests through chat and voice applications in a human-like fashion.
MindMeld was founded in 2011 by Tim Tuttle, a former AI researcher from MIT and Bell Labs,
