Alibaba is acquiring the Israeli start-up company "Infinity Augmented Reality"

Alibaba announced that it is acquiring the Israeli company InfinityAR. The amount of the acquisition was not disclosed but is estimated at $ 10 million. In a statement issued by the Israeli company, she says that the company's employees will join Alibaba's machine vision lab in Israel after three years of partnership.
Alibaba is the largest investor in the company alongside Moshe Singag's Singularity. So far, $ 25 million has been invested in the Israeli company, so the deal does not return the investment in a company established in 2012.
"We expect to join Elibaba as part of their lab in Israel," says Moti Kushner, CEO and co-founder of Alibaba.
The next generation products are very important to the capabilities of the AR world. "According to Lihi Zelnik-Manor, head of Alibaba Computer Vision Lab in Israel," We are pleased that InfinityAR is becoming part of our team after three years of partnership. We are waiting to explore the technologies they have developed. "
The cooperation began when the Israeli company raised $ 15 million in 2016, led by the Chinese giant, at a company value of $ 80 million, which gave it a quarter of its shares. A value that turned out to be very high in view of the current deal. Despite past announcements by company executives that Alibaba will turn the company's product into a central platform, the Chinese company does not intend to use the products, but only the extensive knowledge of the company and its employees. In 2017, Alibaba also acquired Vivisad in a few million dollars, making it the basis for the company's activity in Israel.
InfinityAR was founded in 2012 by Moshe Hogag, and since 2014 it has been managed by Moti Kushnir, a former senior marketing officer at a subsidiary of Intel, and Dr. Matan Proter, who holds a PhD in image processing from the Technion and an experience in several start-ups in the field, .
Alibaba's development center in Israel opened about a year ago under the company's research body, called DAMO Academy. The Chinese Internet giant has invested $ 15 billion in the establishment of eight research and development centers in the areas of artificial intelligence, quantum computing and Pintek around the world - and in Israel as well. The Israeli Center focused on the fields of computer vision, artificial intelligence and machine learning under the direction of Prof. Lihi Zelnik Manor of the Technion. In the past year, the lab has worked in cooperation with Tel Aviv University on research in the areas of video analysis and machine learning.
After the implementation period of the InfinityAR team at the Israeli Research Laboratory, which is expected to last about six months, Kushnir will leave the company. The InfinityAR team will focus on Alibaba's research tasks and will not continue developing its product. However, Alibaba has made it clear that it will continue to honor InfinityAR's existing contracts, which have individual customers in Asia.