Imperial graduates celebrate an exit as Twitter acquires machine learning systems developer Magic Pony Technology.
UK-based machine learning startup Magic Pony Technology’s acquisition by social network Twitter has given cause for cheer for the ecosystem supporting university graduates.
Terms of the acquisition have not been confirmed officially, though sources told news publication TechCrunch that the transaction was worth $150m in cash.
Magic Pony’s shareholders included Octopus Investments, Entrepreneur First, Balderton Capital and 7 Percent, according to deals database PitchBook. They had provided an undisclosed amount of funding over two rounds in 2014 and June 2016. Entrepreneur First is a highly-regarded incubator for ideas developed by recent graduates from the UK’s top universities, including Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College.
Imperial was where Rob Bishop and Zehan Wang, Magic Pony’s two co-founders, graduated from before joining Entrepreneur First.
Alice Bentinck, Entrepreneur First cofounder, said: “For us, Rob and Zehan’s story is a striking reinforcement of why the Entrepreneur First model works, why we bet on individual talent first, and why we bet on hard technology. We believed that for people like Rob and Zehan, going to work at an investment bank or a big company – for a long time the default path outside Silicon Valley for ambitious people – was a terrible waste of their potential.”
Founded in 2014, Magic Pony has developed technology to enhance pictures and videos. The system uses machine learning and neural networks to improve images with data that may not be contained in the photograph itself but can be extracted from similar images.
The company has not disclosed much information about its product, however, remaining largely in stealth mode. Magic Pony has filed 20 patents to date, which should help Twitter – and its video tools Vine and Periscope – to improve its own deep learning capabilities and improve the platform’s photo and video offering.
Jack Dorsey, chief executive and co-founder of Twitter, noted in a blogpost discussing the acquisition that the Magic Pony team will join the Cortex unit, the social network’s machine learning division, without offering specific details on what his company plans to do with the technology.
Dorsey did say, however, that the deal builds on two previous acquisitions – Whetlab in June 2015 and Madbits in 2014. Madbits worked on visual intelligence technology capable of understanding and categorising raw media, while Whetlab developed a platform to make machine learning more efficient.
The most intriguing part about the latest acquisition though is the fact that Magic Pony had also begun exploring virtual and augmented reality applications for its technology. Twitter has not made a play in either sector yet, but it appears the company is seriously exploring opportunities in that sector – a market widely expected to be worth around $150bn by the end of the decade.
With Twitter’s continuous struggles to please Wall Street and attract more users, virtual and augmented reality could be the all-important break the company needs to get back on track.
Rob Bishop, chief executive and co-founder of Magic Pony, said: “Our team has researched and developed state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for visual processing that can identify the features of imagery and use that information to process it in new ways.
“Joining forces with Twitter gives us the opportunity to bring the benefits of that research to hundreds of millions of people around the world, and allows Magic Pony to contribute to better-quality viewing experiences on Twitter.”
Editor-in-chief’s note: The original article on GUV was misleading with respect to Create Lab’s involvement with Magic Pony – the company, while formed by Imperial graduates, was created inside an external venture building programme called Entrepreneur First once both founders had left Imperial. While Imperial’s Create Lab knew the team, they were not part of the creation of Magic Pony, according to Dominic Falcão, manager of Imperial Create Lab in an email on 6 July at 12.30 UK time and the article was changed as a result to recognise EF’s contribution.
