Today, Bloomberg Beta officially announced it joined the Diffbot team with an investment to help expand the company's visual robot technology. Bloomberg Beta, the venture fund from Bloomberg, is dedicated to investing in early-stage companies that change the world of work. Through a combination of computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, Diffbot is reinventing the way businesses access and employ the mountain of unstructured data across the Web. Diffbot powers applications for some of the largest companies in the tech industry, including Cisco, Adobe, Microsoft, and eBay.

'Diffbot makes sense out of one of the biggest, most unruly datasets in the world--the entire Web,' said James Cham, Partner at Bloomberg Beta. 'It makes understanding the web as easy as understanding a structured database. Mike has put together an amazing team to tackle one of the fundamental challenges holding back the Web. It changes the way analysts and business work.'

The Diffbot mission is to bring structure to the unstructured Web, with artificial intelligence that visually reads, understands, and monitors Web pages in the same way as human beings. The result is a suite of products that can pull out unstructured Web data as 'objects' that can be repurposed into structured informational databases or used to develop new consumer experiences.

'We are a unique early stage AI startup in that, with only a small team and some seed funding, we built a product that operates at scale across the entire Web, is used by some of the biggest players in technology, and generates revenue,' said Mike Tung, Founding CEO of Diffbot. 'Our interest in Bloomberg Beta as an investor was not driven by money, but rather the experience and leadership that their team will add to our own.'

About Diffbot:

Diffbot is a robot that examines the Web using computer vision and natural language processing, and provides developers with robust tools to find, extract and understand the objects from any Web page for use in their applications. Thousands of developers and businesses rely on Diffbot APIs to create consumer-friendly applications that use visual interpretation of the Web to re-imagine search, the mobile web and hundreds of other consumer applications. Customers include Adobe, CBS Interactive, Cisco, eBay, Instapaper, Salesforce, Samsung, StumbleUpon. It is based in Palo Alto, CA.