Twitter Tweets Big with London’s Magic Pony Takeover

Magic Pony joins Twitter Cortex, a team of engineers, data scientists, and researchers dedicated to building an easily relatable product.

Twitter has acquired Magic Pony Technology, a London-based developer of machine learning and visual processing technology. The move expands the said capabilities across the social media giant’s video technology, and adds valuable talent to the company’s Cortex team.

“Our team has researched and developed state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for visual processing that can identify the features of imagery so we can use that information to process it in new ways,” said Rob Bishop, CEO and Co-founder of Magic Pony.

“Joining forces gives us the opportunity to bring the benefits of that research to hundreds of millions of people around the world, and allows Magic Pony to contribute to better quality viewing experiences on Twitter.”

The company interdisciplinary team includes 11 PhDs and alumni of some of the top labs in the world with expertise across computer vision, machine learning, high-performance computing, and computational neuroscience.

Bishop will be based out of Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, while Co-founder Zehan Wang and the other members will join the growing London office.

“Machine learning is increasingly at the core of everything we build here. Magic Pony’s machine learning technology will help us build strength into our deep learning teams with world-class talent, so we can continue to be the best place to see what’s happening and why it matters, first,” said Jack Dorsey (pictured), CEO and Co-founder of Twitter.

The takeover builds on the group’s investment in machine learning, beginning with the acquisitions of Madbits in July 2014 and Whetlab in June 2015. Magic Pony will be joining Twitter Cortex, a team of engineers, data scientists, and machine learning researchers dedicated to building an easily relatable product.

“London is an important engineering centre for us, responsible for some of our highest priority product work, like live video. The Magic Pony team there will serve as the European base of the Twitter Cortex team and help recruit more top talent from the region,” said Jeremy Rishel, VP of Engineering at Twitter.