Good for them - machine learning is all the rage these days, but actually turning it into a viable business on your own seems incredibly hard - both getting data to work on, doing something genuinely useful/valuable with it AND somehow monetizing that is a tall order for a startup (ML generally seems much more suitable as an improvement to an existing product IMO). So my impression is that getting acqui-hired by one of the big players is one of the best outcomes for a team like this - you get a nice signing bonus and get to work at one of the few companies with the scale and access to data to actually make viable products with machine learning.