Google just spent $30 million on a small company you’ve never heard of

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 24 Apr 2013

According to TechCrunch, Google just bought a company called Wavii for $30 million. The company has just 25 employees, so that gives everyone a nice chunk of pocket change.

What exactly does Wavii do? You know that feeling of clicking on a link to an article on The New York Times, seeing that it’s over 3,000 words, and then deciding that it’s not worth your time? Wavii solves that by summarizing news items. They also do “natural language processing”, though that’s a broad term that could mean just about anything.

What’s Google going to do with Wavii? They’re going to work in the Knowledge Graph division, which means they’re likely going to be tasked with advanced levels of web scrapping.

I’d tell you more, but I honestly know very little about Wavii, and without a demo of their work, it’s hard to predict what changes we’ll see in Google’s products going forward. That being said, Google thoght they were important enough to spend $30 million, so they must be smart.