Babel Street acquires text analysis platform

Reston tech firm bought Rosette from Mass. company

Published January 18, 2023 by Katherine Schulte

Reston-based web and social media monitoring company Babel Street Inc. has completed its previously announced acquisition of text analytics platform Rosette.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Babel Street first announced the acquisition in November 2022. The company completed its purchase of the platform from Massachusetts-based BasisTech LLC at the end of December 2022, according to a news release published last week.

“Babel Street’s aggressive growth and expansion this year provided further evidence of the critical value of publicly available information when incorporated into our AI-enabled offerings,” Babel Street CEO Michael Southworth said in a statement. “Together, I look forward to expanding partnerships and markets to grow Babel Street’s platform to help government and commercial institutions mitigate risk.”

In 2022, Rosette gained the U.K. Home Office’s Borders, Immigration and Citizenship System as a customer. In partnership with a national Ministry of Defense, Rosette developed and released natural language processing capabilities for several major Southeast Asian and Pacific languages, including Malay, Indonesian and Tagalog, in 2022.

Rosette also improved its criminal justice system applications, using AI techniques to more accurately match names with criminal justice data.

Babel Street also grew last year, expanding its partner network by more than 25%, according to a news release. The company introduces three Insight APIs in August 2022 that allow customers to incorporate standardized, publicly available data onto any chosen platform.

Founded in 2009, Babel Street has offices in Reston and Boston, as well as in Tokyo; Tel Aviv, Israel; London; Canberra, Australia; and Ottawa, Canada.

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