Honestly, if the answer to that is that they invest in you and you use their money to buy google cloud ml services, and you go out and find customers, that doesn't sound bad.
If it's "yet another company spewing buzzwords all over", ML-as-a-service might work, but I'm hoping it's more "adapting cutting edge AI research to do things people will pay for", which requires a hell of a lot more engineering and can't be done by just shoving their data into someone else's black box.
source: i am part of the Algorithmia team.