Ozlo

Ozlo, Inc. developed an artificial intelligence platform focused on conversational search, positioning itself as a next-generation personal assistant. Founded in November 2013 by Charles Jolley and Michael Hanson, the company aimed to provide users with direct answers to complex, nuanced questions rather than just a list of links.

The founders brought significant experience from major tech firms; Charles Jolley was a former engineering manager at Facebook and Apple, while Michael Hanson served as a Principal Engineer at Mozilla and had also worked at Apple. Their vision was to create an AI that could understand context and reason across multiple data sources to deliver precise information. The company secured $14 million in a Series A funding round in May 2016 from investors including Greylock Partners and AME Cloud Ventures.

Ozlo's core product was an AI assistant, initially available on iOS, that specialized in understanding text-based conversations. Unlike other virtual assistants at the time, Ozlo's platform was built on a proprietary knowledge graph that contained over two billion entities, allowing it to process probabilistic assertions alongside established facts. This enabled the assistant to answer multipart questions and handle ambiguous queries, such as finding a restaurant that is both good for a date and serves specific dietary needs. Initially focused on food and drink recommendations, the service expanded to include weather, movie listings, and other local business information. The business model involved providing a suite of APIs—Data, Intent, and Converse—that allowed developers to integrate Ozlo's technology into their own applications and intelligent systems.

In July 2017, Facebook acquired Ozlo in a deal that saw the majority of its 30-person team integrated into the Messenger division to help develop its own AI-powered assistant, M. Following the acquisition, Ozlo's consumer-facing app and APIs were shut down as its technology and team were absorbed by Facebook.

Keywords: conversational AI, knowledge graph, personal assistant app, natural language understanding, text-based AI, mobile search, information retrieval, AI platform, API development, machine learning, intelligent systems, chatbot, virtual assistant, Charles Jolley, Michael Hanson, Facebook acquisition, Greylock Partners, semantic search, data extraction, AI assistant