News

Startup AI Platform Bonsai Acquired by Microsoft

• By Becky Nagel
• 06/20/2018

On Wednesday Microsoft announced that it acquired Bonsai, a Berkeley, Calif.-based artificial intelligence (AI) startup that was founded by two former Microsoft employees and was partially funded by Microsoft Ventures.

According to the Bonsai Web site, its AI platform lets subject-matter experts and data analysts who don't have an AI or machine learning background get hands-on with building AI models and other tools while basically bypassing the underlying algorithms.

"Using a technique we call Machine Teaching," the site states, "[the platform] leverage[s] your subject matter expertise to deconstruct complex problems into the key concepts you want an AI model to learn."

The system automatically chooses a training model for the data -- "no laying out neural nets or tuning hyperparameters required" -- and then feeds the results via a "Bonsai Brain," in which the data can be used as a simulation and can be further manipulated, trained and debugged.

According to the company, these Brains (a.k.a. your data) can be deployed in the cloud, on the edge or on-premises.

Bonsai examples can be found here, and its GitHub page is here.

Bonsai was founded in 2014 by former Microsoft employee Mark Hammond, who graduated from Caltech with a degree in computation and neural systems and worked at the Yale neuroscience department and Numenta, and Keen Browne, who worked in the Microsoft developer division for four years.

In May 2017, Bonsai raised $7.6 million in funding from Microsoft Ventures. ABB, Siemens and Samsung Next.

Microsoft announced its acquisition of Bonsai on Wednesday morning for an undisclosed amount.

"Bonsai's platform combined with rich simulation tools and reinforcement learning work in Microsoft Research becomes the simplest and richest AI toolchain for building any kind of autonomous system for control and calibration tasks," said Gurdeep Pall, Microsoft corporate vice president of Business AI, in the company's official announcement of the acquisition. "This toolchain will compose with Azure Machine Learning running on the Azure Cloud with GPUs and Brainwave, and models built with it will be deployed and managed in Azure IoT, giving Microsoft an end-to-end solution for building, operating and enhancing 'brains' for autonomous systems."

"To realize [our] vision of making AI more accessible and valuable for all, we have to remove the barriers to development, empowering every developer, regardless of machine learning expertise, to be an AI developer," he continued. "Bonsai has made tremendous progress here and Microsoft remains committed to furthering this work."