Microsoft has reportedly signed a letter of intent to acquire Israeli text analysis start-up Equivio, in a deal estimated to be around $200m.
The start-up has been working with Microsoft since 2006 and helped it in developing technologies such as Windows XP, SQL Server and SharePoint Server.
Equivio builds text-analytics software that can integrate appropriate texts from massive documents such as emails and other social and collaboration networks, through the use of machine learning algorithms, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The firm provides text analytics solutions for legal requirements. Its product Zoom is a court-approved machine learning platform for the legal arena.
Zoom enables users to quantify compliance decisions, and is claimed to be used by hundreds of corporations, law firms and government agencies as well as companies such as KPMG and Deloitte.
According to the start-up, the algorithms simplify samples of texts linked to an issue and apply the sorting logic to groups of texts.
The system groups near-duplicate documents, reconstructs email threads, clusters by subject, detects language, does data mining. Its predictive coding software can be trained to find relevant or privileged documents.
Based in Rosh Ha’Ayin, the start-up is founded by CEO Amir Milo, vice-president engineering Yiftach Ravid and vice-president marketing and business developmentWarwick Sharp.
