Walmart Labs India, the local product development division of US retail giant Walmart has acqui-hired key tech team from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics start-up Int.AI, this is the second acqui-hire made by the retailer in India
Acqui-hire refers to the buy out (a company) primarily for the skills and expertise of its staff, rather than for its products or services.
Three engineers, including the co-founders of the firm, Vinay Kumar NP and Praneeth Doguparthy, will join Walmart Labs India.
“We are very happy to let you know that our entire team will be joining Walmart Labs, India. We will continue to apply what we have learnt in order to help optimize the shopping experience for millions of customers. It excites us to get our hands on data at Walmart scale!” Vinay and Praneeth posted on the official website of Int.AI.
They will be part of the health and wellness portfolio under Customer Technology at Walmart Labs, the firm said in a statement.
“We are glad to welcome the Int.ai team to the big Walmart Labs family and believe that their expertise will be a great addition to our data analytics capabilities,” said Hari Vasudev, Country Head and Vice President-Technology, Walmart Labs India.
This is the second acqui-hiring Walmart Labs India has made in the three months, in September the firm acqui-hired Appsfly, a startup which built a system for micro-apps to get hosted and streamed on any platform. Walmart Labs India merged Appsfly’s six-member team into its customer experience engineering group.
Int.AI has invested and built expertise in architecting an analytics automation framework which will support Walmart Labs in developing solutions and supporting large-scale businesses.
