Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will buy Bonsai AI Inc., a Berkeley, Calif.-based maker of artificial intelligence development software.

The deal represents something of a return to roots for the startup’s two co-founders. Bonsai Chief Executive Officer Mark Hammond and Vice President of Product Keen Browne are both former Microsoft engineers. Moreover, the technology giant’s M12 venture capital arm has invested in the startup.

Bonsai offers an AI development platform for manufacturers, utilities and other industrial companies looking to automate their operations. The software abstracts away many of the complexities involved in building a neural network to streamline the development process.

Bonsai places a particular emphasis on easing the training phase of AI projects, a time-consuming process dedicated to honing a model’s accuracy. The startup’s platform lets industrial experts to define the concepts they want an AI to master in a proprietary programming language called Inkling. From there, the software automatically selects the most suitable reinforcement learning algorithm with which to carry out the training.

The startup’s approach has produced some impressive results. Last month, Bonsai revealed that it had created an AI model capable of calibrating Computer Numerical Control machines, a common class of industrial equipment, 30 times faster than a human. Before that, it set a new speed record for training industrial robots that far exceeded the next best result from Alphabet Inc.’s DeepMind AI research group.

Microsoft plans to integrate Bonsai’s technology with the AI services on its Azure public cloud. “Bonsai’s platform combined with rich simulation tools and reinforcement learning work in Microsoft Research becomes the simplest and richest AI toolchain for building any kind of autonomous system for control and calibration tasks,” Gurdeep Pall, the company’s corporate vice president for business AI, wrote in a blog post.

“This toolchain will compose with Azure Machine Learning running on the Azure Cloud with GPUs and Brainwave, and models built with it will be deployed and managed in Azure IoT, giving Microsoft an end-to-end solution for building, operating and enhancing ‘brains’ for autonomous systems,” Pall added.

The acquisition is the latest milestone in Microsoft’s recent efforts to double down on its already substantial artificial intelligence investments. Earlier this year, the company conducted a major internal reorganization that moved its AI offerings and Azure under the wing of a new division called Cloud + AI Platform. The existing AI + Research group has also seen its headcount swell from 5,000 workers to about 8,000 over the past few quarters.

Photo: Microsoft