AI
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Apple reportedly acquires AI and vision startup Vilynx for $50M
Apple Inc. acquired artificial intelligence and vision startup Vilynx Inc. earlier this year for $50 million, according to a report from Bloomberg.
An exact date on the deal is unknown but the Vilynx website was last recorded by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on July 16. The company’s LinkedIn page has been removed, but key employees, including co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Juan Carlos Riveiro and Vice President Phil Zepeda, are still listed in LinkedIn as working at the company.
As with most of its acquisitions, Apple has neither denied nor confirmed the report, instead offering its stock standard reply: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Founded in 2011 with offices in Spain and Palo Alto, California, Vilynx offered a “powerful AI Brain” that was designed to connect people with content that is relevant to them. The company’s AI platform used machine learning and deep learning technology to make content smart and work hard for publishers.
The platform catalogs raw video to make it searchable along with the creation of metadata for video, text and images. The core audience for Vilynx was media companies facing competition from the likes of Netflix Inc. and other media giants.
“Recognition is detecting Michael Jordan’s face,” the company’s former website explained. “Understanding is knowing it’s Michael Jordan, the former NBA basketball player who played for the Chicago Bulls and went to the University of North Carolina.”
For Apple, the technology could be applied to Siri and its general search efforts. Bloomberg notes that the technology could also be applied to Apple’s Photos app to make video more searchable in a similar fashion to how users can find photos by searching for items inside photos.
The acquisition of Vilynx is not the first acquisition Apple has made in AI. Previous acquisitions include Xnor.ai, Inductiv and Voysis.
Prior to acquisition, Vilynx had raised about $16 million in venture capital funding, according to Pitchbook. Investors included Caixa Capital, Kibo Venture Partners and Ridgewood Capital.
Image: Vilynx
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