Founding

The company was founded by three Hertz Fellows,^[5] Dan Roberts,^[6][7] Max Kleiman-Weiner,^[8][9] and John Frank,^[10][11] a co-founder of MetaCarta.^[12] The name Diffeo comes from a shortening of diffeomorphism, which two of the cofounders were learning about in a class about blackholes by Andrew Strominger.^[13] Diffeo was one of the first residents in hack/reduce.^[13]

Funding

In 2016, the company raised a seed round of approximately two million dollars^[14] from investors including Basis Technology^[15] and Carahsoft. Also in 2016, Diffeo acquired Meta, a search engine company founded by Jason Briggs, Emily Pavlini, and Aaron Taylor through a business plan competition at Williams College.^[16][17]

Research

Diffeo's research focused on recommender engines and evaluation protocols for measuring the benefits of recommender engines for end users.^[18][19] As part of running the Knowledge Base Acceleration (KBA) track in NIST's Text Retrieval Conference from 2012 to 2014,^[18] the co-founders of Diffeo released a public dataset of timestamped news and blogs spanning approximately 12,000 hours.^[4] The KBA track aimed to measure approaches to accelerating the assimilation of knowledge into knowledge bases like Wikipedia.^[18]

The company's researchers published papers and open source code on machine learning techniques including Jacobian regularization,^[20] singular spectrum analysis,^[21] and hierarchical agglomerative clustering for entity disambiguation.^{[22][2][23][24]}

Post-Acquisition

In 2021, Salesforce announced an AI-powered assistant that helps B2B sales people with their deals. Briggs, who was previously CEO at Diffeo, is the Senior Director of Product Management, and helped in the creation of this AI assistant. This technology comes from Salesforce's acquisition of Diffeo, which also brought them Briggs.^[25]