Walmart Labs India, the local product development division of US retail giant Walmart, on Thursday announced it would hire key tech team from Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data analytics start-up Int.ai -- its second acqui-hiring in the country within three months.
Acqui-hiring refers to the buying out of (a company) primarily for the skills and expertise of its staff, rather than for its products or services.
Three engineers -- including co-founders Vinay Kumar NP and Praneeth Doguparthy -- from Int.ai will join Walmart Labs India.
They will be part of the health and wellness portfolio under Customer Technology at Walmart Labs, the company 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 -- after micro-app startup Appsfly in September where it merged Appsfly's six-member team into its customer experience engineering group.
Founded in 2016, 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.
"After working for almost 3 years on it, we are very happy to let you know that our entire team will be joining Walmart Labs, India," Vinay and Praneeth said in a separate statement.
"We started Int.ai in the beginning of 2016 with an ambitious mission to build an AI-powered personal data analyst for every business executive," they added.
Int.ai developed expertise in blending Machine Learning with data analytics to uncover insights that significantly impact business metrics.