Dropbox has made some pretty smart (and frugal) acquisitions over the past couple years (including Monday’s acquisition of PiCloud) as it attempts to grow into a full-on platform, but its coolest might also be the one that very few people seem to have noticed: Anchovi Labs. It happened in September 2012 and brought some serious computer vision brains into the Dropbox fold.

Admittedly, the Anchovi acquisition slipped under my radar too, until I heard a couple recent references from people in the know about the computer vision team Dropbox is putting together. Anchovi was founded by four computer vision researchers — all Ph.Ds. — two of whom, Boris Babenko and Peter Welinder, are now engineers at Dropbox (according to the company’s personnel page). The other two, Serge Belongie and Pietro Perona, are professors at Cornell and Caltech, respectively. Belongie’s LinkedIn profile lists him as a Dropbox consultant.