Amazon Acquires Fintech Startup GraphIQ To Hasten Alexa Development

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN is building an empire, amassing resources and lengthening tendrils in artificial intelligence, grocery and retail, publishing, cloud services, media and more.

Recently, the firm identified GraphIQ as a meaningful supplement to its rapidly expanding repertoire.

Amazon purchased the data analysis startup back in May to enhance Alexa and related services but did not report the transaction, which the L.A. Times exposed Thursday. The unnamed leak estimated a $50 million acquisition value.

Based in Southern California, GraphIQ has reportedly begun adding software developers and data associates to its 100-plus member team to work on Alexa.

The firm was founded in 2009 to improve online research through the aggregation, analysis and presentation of data on people, places and products. It eventually launched specialty sites to convey government, real estate, genealogical and other data, and it began selling infographics to media organizations.

GraphIQ pulled back its service offerings and announced in June that it would no longer support publishers, presumably to refocus its efforts on Amazon-related ventures.

The sum of its databases and technologies could better support Alexa’s question-answering capacities and provider search results faster than competitors from Alphabet Inc GOOG GOOGL, Microsoft Corporation MSFT or Apple Inc. AAPL.

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Analyst: Amazon Echo Is A Very Big Deal Ask Siri: How Will You Keep Up With Amazon's Alexa? ______ Image Credit: By Michael Sheehan [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons