Vista Equity Partners, which owns STATS LLC, has acquired Automated Insights (AI) to advance the use of AI’s natural language generation (NLG) technology throughout a wide variety of industries, some of which include business, intelligence, media, and sports.
AI’s NLG platform, also known as Wordsmith, automatically creates narratives with depth and personality out of raw data. Just in 2014, it created over a billion articles for its customers, which include The Associated Press, and Yahoo.
AI’s Chief Executive Officer, Robbie Allen, says of the transaction, “Our entire team is excited to accelerate our growth alongside Vista and STATS.”
And went on to say, “Vista immediately understood the value proposition of and opportunities for our solution, and we believe they will be a great partner in helping our team take AI to the next level.”
Despite the acquisition by STATS and Vista Equity Partners, AI will continue to serve all of its current clients and remain headquartered in Durham, North Carolina, where they are currently located.
Gary Walrath, Chief Executive Officer of STATS, expressed his contentment with the partnership of AI: “We are excited about the unique capabilities our partnership will enable in sports data and technology, and the scale with which we will together be able to provide state-of-the-art new products to our customers.”
Automated Insights makes sense as a partner for STATS. STATS is one of the global leaders in collecting sports data, but could stand to benefit from producing more content from their treasure trove of data. AI’s algorithms and software will certainly help STATS turn out more in-depth content for its clients and consumers in an easy to understand way.
This acquisition for STATS comes on the heels of acquiring The Sports Network, which shows how proactive they have been lately in trying to revolutionize the way sports are watched, understood, and played through the understanding of statistics.