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With a premiere technology, Diffbot says it can help companies replace human labor for data gathering

One of China’s most important Internet companies, Tencent, teamed up with Silicon Valley’s Felicis Ventures to lead a US$10million Series A round into artificial intelligence (AI) technology startup Diffbot, the AI company announced overnight.

Other participants were Amplify Ventures, Valor Capital and a host of individual investors.

Diffbot is a Silicon Valley data company with AI capabilities to mine the web. It offers turnkey APIs, automatic web-crawling, and bulk data capabilities.

Also Read: Tencent rides out economy woes with growth in mobile games and ads

The technology analyses and synthesizes unstructured data for clients to gather more data about people, places and things online.

The company claims to have a premiere technology that “reads and understands the Internet better than any team of humans” and can replace manual labor for large-scale data operations.

“Early-stage technology companies that are attacking the technical frontier of what’s possible need steady leadership and a long-term horizon. We’ve developed a business model for AI that works and I’m excited with this new investment to accelerate our mission even further. Structuring the world’s knowledge is within sight,” said Diffbot Founding CEO Mike Tung in an official statement.

According to the company, it is one of the most profitable AI startups in the world and its structured data technology surpasses that of Google Knowledge.

Also Read: Jack Ma, Tencent join forces to make movies

Major Diffbot clients include Cisco, Adobe, Microsoft, eBay, and Yandex.

For Tencent, the Diffbot investment is the third publically reported deal outside of China in February.

On February 3rd the Internet giant announced an advertising partnership PubMatic to boost ad revenue from outside of China.

On the same day, it announced a partnership with the American sports network ESPN to cover sports games in China (with Mandarin commentary).

The post Tencent leads US$10M round for AI data gathering appeared first on e27.

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