Apple has acquired Laserlike, a small machine learning startup. According to an article in The Information, Apple purchased the four-year-old Silicon Valley-based startup, which was founded by three former Google engineers at the end of 2018. The article adds:
“An Apple spokesperson confirmed the acquisition of the four-year-old startup, which was founded by three former Google engineers, Anand Shukla, Srinivasan Venkatachary and Steven Baker, and had raised more than $24 million from Redpoint Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures, according to CrunchBase.”
image from laserlike.com
Laserlike describes its service as
“Our core mission is to deliver high quality information and diverse perspectives on any topic from the entire web to you. For instance, if you care about knowing when the next SpaceX livestream launch is because you like to watch it with your kids, or if the car you bought two years ago has had a recall, or if a company you’re interested in announces it’s opening a new office where you live, or if there’s a music festival coming to your town, you don’t know when to look for these things, and there’s no product that informs you automatically.
This is one of the things we want to fix on the Internet. Laserlike’s core mission is to deliver high quality information and diverse perspectives on any topic from the entire web. We are passionate about helping people follow their interests and engage with new perspectives.
Laserlike used machine learning to gather masses of information from across the web, then deliver user-specific results to an eponymous app. Users could submit their interests as plain-language search terms to the app, which would then surface results that could be browsed like news and shared socially via an in-app “inbox.”
Apple has been on an AI-related hiring spree in recent months. Apart from hiring Giannandrea and upping its efforts to recruit new Siri engineers, it purchased Silk Labs, a privacy-focused AI device maker.