[6] In late March 2016, the company demonstrated a machine reading system capable of answering arbitrary questions about J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

[8] Maluuba was founded by four undergraduate students from the University of Waterloo, Zhiyuan Wu, Joshua Pantony, Sam Pasupalak and Kaheer Suleman.

[13][14] By 2016 the company employed more than fifty people, and had published fifteen peer-reviewed research papers focused on language understanding.

In June, the company demonstrated a program called EpiReader which outperformed Facebook and Google in machine comprehension tests.

[21] EpiReader made use of two large datasets, the CNN/Daily Mail dataset released by Google DeepMind, comprising over 300,000 news articles; and the Children's Book Test, posted by Facebook Research, made up of 98 children’s books open sourced under Project Gutenberg.

[28][29] The company conducts research into reinforcement learning in which intelligent agents are motivated to take actions within a set environment in order to maximize a reward.