Reddit acquires natural language processing company MeaningCloud

Reddit announced Friday that it’s acquiring MeaningCloud, a natural language processing company, for an undisclosed amount. The MeaningCloud team has joined Reddit and will support machine learning projects across its product, safety and ads teams. The acquisition marks Reddit’s first office in Spain.

MeaningCloud was founded in 2015 and specializes in extracting meaning from unstructured content, such as social conversations and web content. Reddit says the company’s technology will strengthen its machine learning proficiencies and understanding of unstructured data to provide relevant information for Reddit users.

“MeaningCloud helps strengthen Reddit’s platform by helping our community get the relevant information they are looking for even faster,” said Jack Hanlon, the vice president of data at Reddit, in a statement. “With the addition of MeaningClound’s technology, we can continue our mission of providing simpler, richer, and more relevant content to our users. We are thrilled to welcome the talented MeaningCloud team to Reddit.”

The company says today’s announcement aligns with its recent acquisition of Spell, a platform for running machine learning experiments. Spell was founded by former Facebook engineer Serkan Piantino in 2016 to provide a cloud computing solution to allow anyone to run resource-intensive ML experiments without the high end hardware that would normally be necessary.

Reddit currently uses machine learning for personalized recommendations and the Discover Tab, which the app introduced this year. The company also leverages the technology for its safety work and targeted advertising.

Between today’s announcement and the company’s recent acquisition of Spell, Reddit seems to be focused on investing in AI. The company recently said part of its mission is to ensure that any AI the company works on is transparent and does not perpetuate bias.