Apple has reportedly acquired Seattle-based artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning startup Turi for about $200m. Though there has been no official announcement neither about the acquisition nor the financials from the involved companies, reports estimated the deal to be around $200 million.
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The company said in a statement: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our goal or plans”. Some of its platforms include Turi Predictive Services, Turi Machine Learning Platform, Turi Distributed and GraphLab Create.
Turi also claims that its services are in use in sectors including fraud detection, customer churn and sentiment analysis, probably on social media platforms.
Turi changed its name from Dato as it faced a trademark issue with another startup named as Datto, that worked on cloud technology. Bloomberg’s source said that Apple is trying to get an edge up on competitors like Google, Facebook, and Amazon when it comes to “pervasive computing”, or letting devices predict what their users may want based on past experiences. It’s not clear if Turi’s several developer tools will be made available to Apple’s large community of developers or if Turi’s talent and intellectual property is the target of the acquisition.
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Turi’s team is expected to remain in the Seattle region, where Apple has been establishing a presence over the past two years. The iPhone giant’s shift into artificial intelligence was discussed by Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, on the company’s earnings call in July. However, it should be noticed that it isn’t the first-ever AI-based acquisition as Apple has previously bought Perceptio and natural language-processing company, VocalIQ.
