[3] The company grew out of NIST's Text Retrieval Conference where the founding team organized the Knowledge Base Acceleration (KBA) evaluation to measure the effectiveness of recommender engines.

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.

[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.

[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.

[26] The company's user meetings, called The AI<>Tradecraft Forum, brought together speakers from the information extraction industry and the US Intelligence Community, including NGA, United States Army, AFOSI, and NSA.