Apple buys Silk Labs, AI-focused startup

Apple continues to acquire and add small businesses under its skirt. This time the The information informed about another purchase from the company: startup machine learning Silk Labs, which uses artificial intelligence to develop increasingly connected products, especially for homes.

Like most Apple acquisitions, details of this deal were not disclosed; However, it is likely that the purchase took place earlier this year. In terms of value, the transaction may have been relatively small for Apple, as Silk Labs employed only 12 employees and had raised about $ 4 million in funding.

There is also no way to know how Apple will adopt technologies developed by Silk Labs, but startup They focus on home security, retail analysis, access control, parking monitoring and building surveillance, including features such as people detection and face recognition.

Three years ago, the company launched a product on Kickstarter called Sense, a hub (equipped with a camera) designed to be a “digital brain” for gadgets smart home. Its function was to communicate with all connected devices to improve interoperability and learn user needs over time.

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Source: https://www.prweb/releases/silk/labs/prweb13203777.htm

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Both Apple and Silk Labs have already expressed an interest in using artificial intelligence to protect user privacy. With Sense, for example, the startup performed all computational processing on the device itself, storing data and images locally rather than using online services to ensure user privacy.

Silk Labs was founded in 2015 by three engineers: Andreas Gal, Chris Jones and Michael Vines. Before joining the team startup, Gal and Jones were respectively CTO and Mozilla engineer, while Vines was senior technology director at Qualcomm Innovation Center.

As we said, this is not Apple's first foray into artificial intelligence; Last year Ma bought Lattice Data (focused on machine learning and AI) for $ 200 million. This year, the Cupertino giant hired the formerGoogler John Giannandrea, who took over at Apple as head of machine learning and AI strategies.

via MacRumors